Document Imaging Works Hand-in-Hand with Banner

IT Services is pleased to announce that the document imaging service, using the Sungard Xtender product integrated with Banner, has been operating successfully in six pilot offices since the Banner 7.3 upgrade in late January. This new service provides the ability to use digital storage rather than physical storage for important university documents. Scanned documents can be attached to Banner records or stored independently.

Each of the six offices in the pilot worked extensively with the project team to define their workflows and document archiving needs. As of April 10, the Alumni office has scanned nearly 13,000 documents. Finance and Business Affairs has scanned more than 5,000 documents. Human Resources, Student Financial Assistance, the Office of the Registrar, and Payroll are also in the initial group of offices.

The Office of Student Financial Assistance has been a leader in this effort, developing very comprehensive procedures for scanning, verifying, and indexing scanned documents. The six pilot offices are all working to not only bring document imaging to their area, but also to develop recommendations for university-wide processes for managing documents.

The project team is excited about moving this project out to other campus offices. Three more offices have started to define their document imaging requirements and will begin using document imaging within the next few months. Demand for imaging services is anticipated to be strong, and the project team is preparing by training additional staff to meet that demand.

Next Steps
Starting with a pilot with Physical Facilities, the Purchasing office will soon allow images to be attached to online requisitions in the native Banner system. Purchasing also intends to use document imaging to scan in contracts and related documents to create a history of purchases and/or contracts. 

Additionally, a Sungard enhancement allowing imaged documents to be accessed via BannerWeb is anticipated this year. This will allow departments using online requisitioning to attach pertinent documents, enabling document approvers to view these attachments.  As we move online requisitioning to other payment types (1099 payments, direct pay invoices), the ability to scan and attach invoices and receipts will be available to all. 

Future Directions
Several offices, notably Human Resources and Student Financial Assistance, have requested a solution to allow for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities.  This would allow offices that collect information on printed forms to scan in documents and pick up unique identifying information (i.e. SSN or Banner PLUS number).  Documents could be scanned and automatically indexed into Banner without any human intervention, saving time and reducing data entry errors.