Nonprofit
The New York Foundling is a social services organization with a 147-year history of supporting youth and families in need throughout all five boroughs in New York City as well as in Puerto Rico. The Foundling began in 1869 as a home for abandoned babies, and now provides a wide array of life-changing services, including foster care and adoption services, support for young mothers in tough circumstances, residential programs and job placement for adults with disabilities, and even an overnight summer camp for children in the welfare system.
The organization operates various staffed residential homes and seven offices throughout the boroughs and recently relocated their headquarters to a new space in Manhattan with far less room to store human resources records. With over 1,700 employees and counting, maintaining an organized file structure with a paper filing system and limited space had become impossible to manage efficiently.
The Foundling needed a digital solution to be able to store all their files in one unified location and to allow their 19 human resources staff members to access the files on demand. They turned to Digiscribe for help digitizing, storing, and managing over 9,000 of terminated employee files as well as 1,700 current employee files. Digiscribe’s document scanning & indexing services and cloud document management software have enhanced The New York Foundling’s human resources department in the following ways:
With hundreds of terminated employee files at 40+ pages each in addition to records of their 1,700 current employees, The New York Foundling was struggling to maintain an organized filing system and desperately needed a centralized place for human resources files that allowed for quick and easy on-demand access. With limited storage space at their new headquarters, human resources staff had to dig through drawers in a cramped back room to find the information they needed for ad hoc social services audits throughout the year.
The audits are carried out by agencies such as City of New York, Office of People with Developmental Disabilities, and Office of Mental Health, and happen randomly and without notice. That means there is the potential for one or more auditors to appear at one of several New York Foundling offices and residential programs at any time, where they each typically request to review up to 20 files at a time. With their paper filing system, locating, scanning, and delivering the files being audited often took several hours, especially when the audit requests were made at locations other than the headquarters where the HR files were housed. With the potential of concurrent audits, this time-consuming process simply wasn’t sustainable and HR staff was spending valuable time searching for files instead of on work that supports the organization’s mission.
The New York Foundling needed a digital solution to help them more easily manage thousands of human resources files and allow them to work efficiently within the smaller office space in their new headquarters. With document scanning & indexing services and FileBound cloud document management software, Digiscribe was able to address each of these issues.
At the outset of the project, Digiscribe scanned all of The New York Foundling’s human resources files, from employment applications to tax-related records. Each employee file can include up to 77 different types of documents which require expert identification and indexing by Digiscribe’s data entry team.
The scanned and indexed documents were uploaded to FileBound, a cloud-based document management system, and organized into 13 discrete projects based on category. In addition to being able to navigate files by category, HR staff also needed the flexibility to search files using a variety of terms such as employee name, social security number, location, or document type, and Digiscribe’s indexing expertise provided the perfect solution.
Now, the only paper documents The Foundling stores at their headquarters are employment applications and temporary staff & intern paperwork, which are sent to Digiscribe for scanning once per year. Even onboarding paperwork, which used to be cumbersome and fully paper-based, is now completed with Ultimate’s HRIS software, UltiPro®. New hires complete and sign paperwork electronically, then HR staff verify it before uploading their entire personnel file to FileBound. The raw data from the electronic documents is captured in UltiPro and shared with FileBound thanks to FileBound’s Importer Pro module, eliminating the need for any data entry of records in FileBound. Any changes made to employee information are shared with FileBound which means employee information is kept up to date in both systems without the need for manual data entry.
