Workflow Automation Simplifies School District Processes

_ By: Susan Beltz _
Director of Applications Development and Support
Oakland Unified School District

While the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in Oakland, Calif., may have been founded in the 19th century, a few years ago we launched a five-year plan to promote excellence, with the goal of students finding joy in their academic experience while, at the same time, learning the skills they needed to be successful in future academics and their adult careers. Serving 37,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12, the school district has embraced three core priorities: Fiscal Vitality, Access to Quality Schools, and Organizational Resilience.

The Need for Accountability and Quality

As part of the district’s accountability and quality priorities, we chose to automate certain tasks that were bogging down our staff in paperwork and manual follow-up. In search of a simpler way to initiate vendor contracts, approve companies that do work for the district, and ascertain the necessary approvals from various levels within the district administration, we implemented a workflow automation solution called Nutrient Workflow.

It Started with District Vendor Management

For years, OUSD had managed its extensive vendor clearance process through a paper-based system. It entailed manually filling out a contract, collecting a vendor’s resume/credentials and TB test results, processing the vendors fingerprints for clearance, filling out a statement of work, and then sending all the information to a number of offices within the school district for approval—the school’s principal, network superintendent, chief of schools, the school board, and possibly the state/federal funding and risk management offices. You may have similar paper-based processes in your district.

The process was time-consuming and left much room for human error. This sometimes caused a vendor to start work later than ideal, delaying the delivery of services to schools and central office departments. While the district doesn’t have an unwieldy number of approvals, the nature of the paper process was that once something left your sight, you didn’t know where it was anymore. There was just no visibility.

OUSD clears a few hundred vendors each year (and repeat vendors must be cleared again at the beginning of each school year), and some of them have more than one contract with the district. The school system has 86 schools and 56 central office departments, so the number of potential users (which includes its vendors) is between 100 and 200 each year.

Getting Workflow Automation Up and Running

We’re currently running two major processes on the Nutrient Workflow platform. One is vendor management, where recommended vendors are vetted and approved to work with the school district. The other process is contract initiation, where a project is suggested, with an approved vendor attached, and then routed throughout various levels of the district’s hierarchy for approval.

The Benefits of Workflow Automation for OUSD

Moving from a paper-based system to Nutrient Workflow has made the contract and vendor approval process more efficient, especially due to the transparency of the process.

District-Wide Visibility

With the paper-based system, once the paperwork left the contract initiator’s hands, they had no idea where the request was or who to nudge for action. Now, when a user launches the system, within moments they can see, for example, that the contract was cleared by the state and federal compliance office as well as the network superintendent, and that it’s now with the chief of schools, allowing them to follow-up with the chief of schools’ office as needed should there be an unexpected delay in the process.

Streamlined Internal/External Communication

The system has also eliminated the need to chase down a vendor for necessary information. By automating the process with the Nutrient Workflow platform, users simply fill out a Web form to initiate the contract. An automated email goes to the vendor to complete the web form and attach their resume and TB test results (as well as any other credentials the contract might require), and then the package is sent to procurement for approval. If the procurement office requires more information from the vendor, the request bounces back directly to the vendor rather than being sent to the contract initiator to start over again. Clerical workers at the individual schools save a tremendous amount of time because they no longer need to track down paperwork through email and phone follow-up.

Compliance and Risk Mitigation

With a more efficient, timely, and accountable system for initiating vendor contracts and clearing the companies with which it wants to do business we’ve seen further benefits around compliance and reduced payment cycles.

First and foremost, the system delivers efficient risk mitigation, streamlining the process to ensure that the vendors with which the schools work are reputable, insured, and not a safety risk to the district’s staff and students. Many departments benefit from the auditable nature of Nutrient Workflow, from accounting to risk mitigation, as each step of the approval process is documented.

Reduced Time to Payment

The workflow also ensures on-time vendor payment by collecting all necessary paperwork directly from the vendors and automatically issuing purchase orders upon approval of the contract. Clerical and administrative staff members save time with every step of the process, as they can check the status of any outstanding payments 27/7.

Automating More Processes

The system has worked so well that OUSD is looking to add request types to help in other departments. The district may also add a few smaller tasks to Nutrient Workflow, such as the ability to look at a vendor’s cumulative spend and a process to plan and seek approval for field trips.