Lawndale Elementary School District

Decades of Paperless Progress with 100’s of Automated Processes

Lawndale Elementary School District (LESD) is in the southern region of Los Angeles County and offers high-quality Preschool, Transitional Kindergarten, and Kindergarten programs to almost 5,000 students directed by a staff of over 240 teachers and administrators.

Lawndale ESD has come a long way since they first began using Laserfiche over 20 years ago! ECS Imaging assisted them to leverage Laserfiche Forms bringing numerous benefits to their staff by allowing them to create workflows and forms to automate and simplify many manual business processes. ECS created some of the initial Forms and trained the District to support and develop the Forms and Workflows going forward. The Mileage Reimbursement Forms include an integration with Google Maps to auto-calculate and fill in mileage routes.

The Field Trip Request Form uses Workflow to automate all the steps including a database lookup to the Student Information System to find all students for the teacher completing the form. For a process that usually involves a lot of back and forth between teachers, parents, and school administrators, Laserfiche Forms and Work-flow makes the whole process easy by automating and simplifying every step in the process.

Field Trip Form Process includes

  • If the “Lunch Provided” option is selected on the form, Workflow will send a list of the students to the Cafeteria Manager to let them know how many students will need to have lunch provided.
  • Workflow also sends an email notification to the parents of all students so they can view details of the trip, determine whether their child will need to be provided lunch, enter emergency contact information, or deny the field trip request altogether.
  • Before the trip, Workflow finds the list of students who have not filled out a permission slip (denied permissions not included) and sends this list to the teacher.
  • A few days before the trip date, Workflow sends the list of students going along with their emergency contact information to the teacher.
  • Note the multiple tabs for various pages of the Form.

The New Employee Onboarding Form converted a paper packet with dozens of pages into an online, paperless process. With a Laserfiche Form new hires can now fill out their info once and it is populated on all of the forms. Forms also guides the user how to fill it out, provides helpful tips along the way, while uploading their documentation automatically into the Laserfiche Repository.

The following outlines the steps Involved in the new Employee Onboarding process:

  1. Submit Onboarding Application
  2. Application assigned to HR Team
  3. HR Reviews Application
  4. Application Saved in Repository
  5. Workflow Monitors Folder and moves the new staff application as well as the generated pdf’s of their tax forms to the appropriate location in the repository once they are officially hired.

Secrets to Lawndale’s Laserfiche Success:

  • Discover needs based on end user input.
  • Involve end users in development.
  • Develop end user capacity to ease management/maintenance.
  • Foster champions for digital transformation.
  • Use the right tool for the job.

Lawndale’s Best Practice Tips:

  • Design to minimize process errors.
  • Design to reduce maintenance needs.
  • Review forms with end users to ensure forms meet their needs.
  • Simplify processes when possible.
  • Training for management.
  • Consistent upgrades of forms and workflows.
  • Always use an incognito browser for editing forms.

Their Laserfiche Forms can be accessed from within the Forms application or from a link on an intranet or Internet site. Below are thumbnails of forms the District is currently using.

If you would like to see a webinar of this success story, email us for the link to the webinar recording.

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Lawndale ESD