Westbrook Technologies, developer of Fortis and FortisBlue enterprise document management (EDM) software, announced that Portland Public Schools has implemented Fortis to securely share, archive and retrieve student documents. With approximately 47,000 students in 85 schools, the school system is realizing huge savings in time and money.

Portland Public School’s implementation started in their Special Education department where the school district has created a more streamlined process for sharing documents with psychologists and specialists. “Now these professionals use Fortis Web to access documents online for viewing or making changes to student documentation,” said Ramzi Adas, information technology manager of Imaging Services for Portland Public Schools. “We moved Special Education from working with extremely manual and time-consuming processes to a quick, simple method of operation which they love.”

During the process of sourcing multi-function printers, the district asked vendors to submit document management proposals. They chose IKON Office Solutions, a Ricoh company, who implemented Fortis as part of the Portland Public Schools’ solution.

“IKON’s expertise in creating effective document management solutions in educational environments was key in selecting them as our vendor partner. A critical component of our solution is the Fortis software application which provides scalability, Web access, and integration with other applications that the district uses,” said Adas. “Fortis was one of the few solutions that offered all the options we needed. In our Special Education department alone, we have eliminated printing since documents are instantly accessible on demand.”

ROI
Fortis reduced the turnaround time for retrieving Special Education documentation from three to four hours to three to four minutes. In addition, Fortis increased overall productivity by 85% measured in the time employees no longer wait to obtain documents before scheduling appointments with parents. In addition, they no longer waste time searching for misplaced documents.

By archiving documents in Fortis, Portland Public Schools was able to downsize their storage facility’s square footage. Initially they leased a 30,000 square foot storage area which required the support of ten employees. With Fortis, they reduced the space they needed to 15,000 square feet reducing employee support to three. The district was then able to reassign seven employees to other tasks. The unused space was leased out to the county producing a minimum of $50,000 in cost savings.

Fortis was also implemented in several of the school systems’ other departments including Security Services and Information Technology, Finance, Imaging Services, English as a Second Language, and Talented and Gifted.


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