2012 winter honorees

Campus safety inspections, which determined the type of environmental health and safety training needed for faculty, staff, students, and researchers, took three staffers four days followed by several days of data input. The school automated the process, cutting the number of hours in half and saving more than $49,000 in annual training and $8,000 in staff and travel costs.

Baldwin Wallace University's IT department was maintaining more than 65 types of hardware with multiple operating systems, which tied them down and made it difficult to be forward-thinking. Through virtualization, BW consolidated its computing and storage infrastructure. Now it has 87 percent fewer servers, and projects a three-year ROI of 194 percent.

UWG's pub and print department was mandated to become self-funded by 2013. The department searched and found equipment that could meet its needs affordably in other departments and shifted them to pub and print. Worker responsibilities were realigned and some student work was offloaded to the students themselves. The efforts generated both productivity improvements and financial savings.

After doubling its number of graduates, Polk needed to automate its graduation applications process. A customized Access database was created with built-in reporting capabilities. An automated download capability was added to link graduate information with the reporting database. The result: Advising hours have been reduced by 1,600 per year and the additional clerical help is no longer needed.

SCU's Clinical Internship program was manually maintained and took hours each day for staff to review credit request forms and patient procedure logs. A new Clinical Internship Portal automated students' schedule. Students and clinical faculty now submit and approve credit and patient tracking forms online, substantially reducing time involved and eliminating paper.

Four different programs were being used for end-of-course evaluations, and the disparate system was inconsistent and slow. The college purchased an online system with automatic emails delivering a personalized URL specifically for the class taken. The pilot achieved a savings of more than $17,000.

NMU's Foundation Scholarship application and selection process was inefficient and labor intensive. A web application was designed that matched selection criteria to the student's academic and biographical profile. The new system reduced data entry, paper, timing, and labor costs, while increasing data accuracy and providing more information to selection committees.

Financial aid verification was a cumbersome, paper-intensive project that took 6-8 weeks and was prone to errors. With an automated verification solution, DCCCD shaved weeks off the schedule, reduced and realigned staff resources, and even retained some at-risk students.