Hawaiian State Public Library System (HSPLS)
Summary Data
HSPLS provides library services across 7 islands in the State of Hawaii.
Industry
State Sector/Public Services
Geography
USA
Consulting
Training Services
Nintex Workflow & Process Automation
technologies
SharePoint
Windows Server Hyper-V
Challenges/Goals
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Automate manuals steps and eliminate redundant steps in the system
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Eliminate reliance on paper
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Provide a one-stop-service
Solution/Approach
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Determine the platform (SharePoint)
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Meet with stakeholders to understand both the process and the culture
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Define the functional specifications
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Build the solution to include a SharePoint site, lists, libraries and workflows.
Overview
The Hawaii State Public Library System (HSPL) has more than 50 branches located across seven (7) islands. Their mission is to provide Hawaii’s residents, in all walks of life, and at each stage in their lives, with access to education, information, programs and services, and to teach and nurture the love of reading and the habit of life-long learning.
Challenges/
Goals
HSPLS had an archaic system for managing supply orders across their more than 50 State Branches. The existing solution involved a variety of manual and repetitive tasks, combining manual delivery of Excel forms, multiple emails among participants, version skew among documents and the need to print and markup the spreadsheets repeatedly. The system was time-intensive, difficult to manage and used a lot of paper.
It was the goal of this project to automate, streamline, and optimize the system in order to provide a “one-stop-service” location for Ordering staff members, as well as other staff members that are the recipients or the suppliers of information.
Solution/
Approach
Understanding the power of the SharePoint platform and because HSPLS was already an active user of SharePoint, Synergy recommended leveraging their existing Web infrastructure in order to architect the solution. With that decision made, Synergy embarked on a series of requirements gathering sessions which gave us not only an understanding for the existing processes, but a look into the culture of the organization and sense of the required improvements.
The Synergy team then worked closely with the HSPLS team to define a functional specification that defined the workflow process, the lists and libraries that would be built, the required metadata columns and the views that would be required.
Once the specifications were signed off, Synergy proceeded to build out the solution by creating the Ordering site, required lists and libraries and developing the various workflows that were required.
The solution addressed both technical and cultural challenges by keeping list views for data entry primarily in datasheet views in order to provide a familiar interface for staff who were accustomed to doing tasks Excel spreadsheets.
Results
The result was a “one-stop-service” with a user-friendly, intuitive solution that automated manual steps and provided custom views based on user roles. Workflows aggregated information and provided validations on ordering lists that previously took many hours to complete with paper. All branches are now connected and have visibility across the State ordering system.
