MassBay Community College smooths expansion, improves faculty and student services with Adobe Acrobat Sign

Greg Friedlander was excited to bring his extensive HR and payroll administration experience in the private sector to one of the nation’s top-ranked community colleges, Massachusetts Bay Community College.

“I came in with a lot of different skills than others on the college’s Payroll team, including a familiarity with the power of digitizing business processes,” explains Friedlander, payroll accountant IV at MassBay.

Even though advanced digital tools for learning are common across the college, many of MassBay’s everyday administrative tasks still relied heavily on moving paper around manually. Friedlander wanted to change that in Payroll and have the team’s internal processes live up to the college’s high standards.

Photo courtesy, MassBay Community College.

Supporting faculty with automation

Having led process changes in other industries, Friedlander set to work exploring new ways of working. Meeting with MassBay’s AVP and CIO, Michael Lyons, Friedlander emphasized the efficiency benefits of moving away from paper-and-pen signatures and storing original documents in dozens of file boxes in the college’s basement, known internally as “the dungeon.”

With a passion for business process improvement, Friedlander took on the role of the department’s visionary, becoming MassBay’s resident champion for Adobe Acrobat Sign.

He started by designing an online workflow for processing reimbursement forms. Previously, faculty and staff could wait several months to get expenses reimbursed after attending conferences or traveling for college-related activities. They often walked paperwork around campus to get physical approval signatures. Even documentation sent via email required time-consuming processes for printing, signing, and scanning.

Today the digitized forms, converted from Microsoft Word documents into Adobe Acrobat PDF, route quickly and automatically for e-signatures, simplifying the process for requesters, approvers, and the HR team.

MassBay now pays out reimbursement requests five times faster, dropping from many months to a few weeks. Seeing this impact, the HR team adopted the same approach for faculty attendance timesheets and performance review forms. Word continued to spread to other colleagues, and additional departments followed suit.

From back-office to front-line benefits

Busy students no longer have to wait in long lines at the Office of the Registrar when deadlines approach for filing registration and graduation forms. During peak periods in the past, the office extended working hours into the evening to accommodate late filers.

Now students fill out forms online at their convenience and with a click, send forms for processing, including required e-signatures. Since key fields are set up for mandatory completion, the number of forms with missing information has dropped substantially.

Laura Lavallee, registrar at MassBay, estimates that the digitized process improves her team’s productivity by about 30 percent, freeing up time to provide more direct help to students. “The Adobe e-signature platform makes everyone’s lives easier,” says Lavallee. “It’s also wonderful that we cut our office’s carbon footprint by 89 percent by eliminating so many paper forms.”

Susan Maggioni, assistant provost at MassBay, counts herself as another enthusiastic user. “Our students expect us to be efficient and organized. It’s the right thing to do, both operationally and for the environment.”

Maggioni also likes that forms no longer get lost on someone’s desk or in their email inbox. As an administrator who frequently signs documents, the ability to log into the system and see everything she needs to e-sign and approve in one place increases her own administrative efficiency. “The Acrobat Sign experience is fantastic,” says Maggioni. “I can’t imagine going back to the old way of doing things.”

Propelling career-boosting internships

Students seeking internships are now also benefitting from automated processes. Julie Ginn, director of Career Services at MassBay, is proud that her office helps students secure more than 40 internships each academic year with local organizations in hospitality, interior design, biotech, computer science, and other sectors.

Previously, the manual process for completing internship learning agreements required students to complete a form that was then sent to the host company to sign. Signatures by a MassBay faculty sponsor, the dean of the academic division, and finally Career Services would follow. The process could take over three weeks. With the new workflow, learning agreements are completed in under a week.

Automated reminders help make signature-chasing a thing of the past. “I get at least 40 percent of my time back,” says Ginn. “I have more time to meet with students to give them a deeper understanding of internships and job opportunities.”

A vision for the future

Friedlander is proud of his work to help the e-signature platform gain popularity across MassBay. The benefits have spread far beyond his original vision for the Payroll department, resulting in campus-wide impacts. For example, since rolling out Acrobat Sign, the college orders 20 percent less paper. Teams also note that the increased efficiency is saving money and making them more productive.

“MassBay’s vision is to be a catalyst for transformation. By making the most of our resources, we can help even more students realize their education and career goals now and into the future,” Friedlander says.

For more information, please see how Adobe Acrobat Sign creates a new way of working for students and parents, faculty and staff, and suppliers and partners.