School District Improves Organizational Efficiency
Organization Profile
- Industry: Education (K-12)
- Location: Ottawa County, Michigan
- Number of Students: 48,100
- Number of Employees: 587
- Tyler Client Since: 2007
- Tyler Products/Solutions: Enterprise ERP, Content Manager
Challenge
Ottawa Area Intermediate School District (ISD) was using various platforms, from home-grown systems to inefficient spreadsheets — for business services and human resources management. Employees were entering data and requests multiple times in multiple places. The countless, disparate platforms were costing the school district significant money, time, and effort to maintain, update, and track all the data, which then had to also be entered into Enterprise ERP.
For Ottawa Area ISD, open enrollment was a cumbersome process that resulted in three different departments and three different systems processing employee selections. The process was time-consuming, manual, and prone to errors.
“It was an opportunity that I saw for an increase in efficiency. We had a benefits app that our developers created a few years back. We were using that for open enrollment. It worked for us, but I saw a lot of repetitive work being done and unnecessary,” stated Meredith Kucharczyk, Ottawa Area ISD director of finance.
Solution
District leadership recognized opportunities to develop more efficient processes, so the school district turned to Tyler Technologies. The district leveraged the integrated tools that already existed in Enterprise ERP to maximize their employees’ time and effort effectively.
Utilizing fully integrated software has optimized:
- Benefits Administration
Allowing employees to enter their personal data and benefits elections directly into Enterprise ERP through Employee Access, reducing redundant data entry.
- Contract Management
Centralizing contracts for independent contractors into one system improved organizational efficiency, allowing both HR and accounts payable to access the same information without duplicating efforts.
- Expense Reports
Eliminating paper, manual reimbursement requests that needed to be signed, scanned, and emailed. Employees can now submit electronic requests to accounts payable with automations for approvals.
We at Ottawa Area ISD value our relationship with Tyler Technologies, and we continue to look for ways that we can align more and more systems under the Tyler Technologies umbrella.
Chris Lamer
Chief Financial Officer
Result
By simplifying the open enrollment process with a connected solution, the district has gained back time, increased accuracy, and made the process easier for employees. “The major benefit is tying the system together and tying the different departments together too. Instead of working in silos, it just all flows together, and it is just made everyone’s life easier,” Kucharczyk emphasized.
Additionally, as a result of implementing new processes in accounting and HR, Ottawa Area ISD saw an increase in productivity through eliminating duplicative work, faster processing time for contractor payments and employee reimbursements with approval automations, and improved reporting and budgeting with all expenses being entered in Enterprise ERP.