Youth Organization Digitizes Records Prior to Office Move

Summary

Boys Hope Girls Hope (BHGH) is an international organization centered on cultivating youth empowerment through the foundation of education and holistic support. Operating in 16 cities in the United States and Latin America, BHGH utilizes structured programming adapted to the needs of each community, unique curriculum, and partnerships with local schools and universities. Thousands of Scholars take part in BHGH’s programs across the United States and Latin America.

The Fujitsu solution helps Boys Hope Girls Hope digitize thousands of paper documents to minimize both physical space requirements and improve both usability and searchability. They, too, shared their planning and considerations for Project Cortex, to further minimize indexing and metadata management to further remove humans from the tagging and sorting process. The real goal is to provide more time spent creating opportunities and education through college – to develop future “graduate stories of hope.”

Challenge

Thomas Casey, Vice President of Operations, identified the organization’s need to manage their supporting documents and business artifacts. BHGH has three main programs that create significant paper-based business artifacts. These include academic documents, operational paperwork, program data, in addition to the usual documents required in most businesses, like HR forms, tax and payroll records, and business archives.

The Residential Program: In each BHGH home, six to twelve scholars are cared for by live-in, round-the-clock professional Residential Counselors. Scholars share chores, do homework together, attend religious services, eat, and grow up together.  The amount of supporting documents per scholar is staggering. Now multiple that by multiple 2-3 residences per city and 14 cities in the United States alone.

 

The Academy Program:  Like residential scholars, Academy scholars are enrolled in college-preparatory programs at top-rated area schools or provided college-preparatory curriculum in their current school district; scholars are matched with tutors who help them reach their academic potential and mentors who share their life experience; they are enrolled in extracurricular activities designed to help them discover themselves and the world around them; and they engage in community service projects that teach them the value of living a life committed to serving others.

• Collegian Program: For BHGH residential and non-residential scholars, a college education is not a dream, it is an expectation. This program is a multi-year, interactive program with specific activities that are proven to pre-pare scholars for the demands of campus life and independent living.

In 2012, Microsoft donated over $1M in software to enable automation of BHGH systems. As part of the digital transformation Journey, in 2020, BHGH is again leveraging the Microsoft platform to automate their document management business challenges.

“There’s a real need to safeguard these documents and manage the document lifecycle. BHGH’s Program is based upon Holistic support of our Scholars. Having the right documents available over the Scholars journey with our programs is critical.  We thought, ‘Why don’t we digitize these documents, so right people have the right data at the right time, in a secure and paperless method.”

Strategy

BHGH wanted to start with their legacy documents. As part of their Network Headquarters physical relocation project, BHGH wanted to digitize their back files. In business for over 40 years, the amount of paper-based information was enormous.

BHGH found a willing partner in Fujitsu, which supplied Cloud-ready document scanners to help the non-profit launch its Digital Documents initiative, with the goal to scan, index and store supporting documents in multiple locations based upon document type including the Microsoft SharePoint. Microsoft SharePoint offers a secure online location to scan, manage and store copies of the important documents and business artifacts.

The Digital Documents project launched in early 2020 with a pilot project at the St. Louis, Missouri, office. Additional Projects are planned for the 14 Residential Programs across the United States.

As part of the initiative, BHGH staff and volunteers will be utilizing the Fujitsu fi -7300NX scanners on mobile carts, without computers, to scan documents to SharePoint. The Fujitsu fi -7300NX can be deployed without a computer, connected directly to Fujitsu’s NX Manager Server hosted on premise or in Microsoft Azure. This significantly reduces the burden on IT to maintain and secure computers dedicated solely to scan stations.

BHGH can scan once and the Fujitsu NX Manager can send digital images of each document up to 3 unique locations and as multiple file types (such as PDF files and JPEG images).  Documents can start workflows using Microsoft UiFlow or securely stored in SharePoint or OneDrive. Document access can also be made available using Microsoft Teams.

As security is always top priority, the Fujitsu fi -7300NX Scanners don’t store any of the scanned images. The solution does not require a scanning station (PC or desktop) as the documents are scanned directly to the NX Manager Server, to be hosted in Microsoft Azure.

 

Results

The BHGH Digital Document effort is a seemingly simple solution that was quickly delivering benefits to Scholars and the support teams.

Non-profit organizations are not exempt from business automation. As the managers of donors’ contributions, they need to make they realize good return on their investment of time and talent. Social service agencies can realize benefits of digitizing documents because it streamlines access to and centralizes the location of documents that are vital to our mission.

The reliability and usability of the Fujitsu scanners paired with the Microsoft Cloud are providing BHGH and other organizations with endless ways to streamline their operations.