SUCCESS STORY

U.S. Public School System
Applies Intelligent Forms
Automation Solution
to Student Nutrition
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools saves time and reduces
risk with OpenText™ LiquidOﬃce and OpenText™ TeleForm

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) is located in
the Charlotte, North Carolina region and provides
academic instruction to more than 148,000 students
in pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12 in 170 schools
throughout Mecklenburg County. Each day, approximately
19,000 CMS employees guide their students according
to the highest standards, earning CMS widespreadacclaim as one of America’s best school districts.

INDUSTRY

Background• Rising application volumes outgrowing

Approximately 1,400 employees work in the Child Nutrition Services department at
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS). Their mission is to contribute to a successful
academic experience and encourage a lifetime of healthy eating by providing affordable
and nutritious student meals. Each day, they provide 36,000 breakfasts and 78,000
lunches to students, totaling more than 20 million meals a year. To manage the growing
volume and complexity of students’ nutritional needs, CMS, with the help of PCSForms
Division from partner PCS Revenue Control Systems (PCS), streamlined and automatedits manual processes with OpenText LiquidOffice and OpenText TeleForm to save time,
improve service, and reduce risk.

Challenge
Increasing volume of application forms
The CMS Child Nutrition Services department might be compared to a restaurant chain
with 170 locations. Menus are designed and approved by a menu committee, and meals
are computer analyzed to ensure they meet federal nutrition guidelines. However, unlikea restaurant, menus are customized to accommodate students with special dietaryneeds. In recent years, student volumes and special requirements have outgrown thestaff’s manual, paper-based processes.

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M AT I O N M A N A G E M E N T

Education

CUSTOMERCharlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

PARTNERPCS Revenue Control Systems

CHALLENGES
existing processes• Inefficiencies and delays with manual,

paper-based processes• Increased risks with manual data

capture and workflows

SOLUTIONS• OpenText™ LiquidOﬃce• OpenText™ TeleForm

BENEFITS• Digitized processes increase productivity,

resulting in time and cost savings• Time redirected to more value-added activities• Full process visibility and audit trails

help reduce risks• Ability to process 13 times more simple

diet order forms per day

SUCCESS STORY“I used to process 10 to 12 of the simple
diet order forms in a day, but now I cando more than 20 in an hour.”
LILIANA MYERS, DIETETIC TECHNICIAN, CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG SCHOOLSCatherine Beam, Executive Director for Child Nutrition Services
at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, explains that they began theprocess of automating and streamlining paper-intensive processesseveral years ago: “All of this started when free and reduced meal
application processing was moved from the individual schools tothe central office. We were getting roughly 32,000 paper application
forms that had to be processed within 10 days of receipt. There was
no way to handle that manually.”

SolutionIntelligent forms automation
Enter PCS (or PCS Revenue Control Systems, Inc.), a nationwide
provider of K‐12 school food and nutrition services technology andvalued OpenText partner. The school board enlisted PcsForms, adivision of PCS, to deliver a solution for processing meal applicationforms. PcsForms deployed LiquidOffice and TeleForm.
TeleForm is an intelligent forms automation solution that provides
a paper on-ramp for document and forms-driven processes
using powerful design, capture, and recognition technologies toeliminate time-consuming manual data entry, improve efficiency,and control costs. Organizations can easily handle thousands offorms a week using automatic classification and data extraction, andcan update integrated systems with accurate validated information.
LiquidOffice is an intelligent forms automation solution that enablesorganizations to automate people and forms driven processes
using electronic forms and workflow capabilities for improved
efficiency, control, and customer satisfaction. LiquidOffice integrates
with TeleForm to bridge paper and digital worlds and deliver end-toend intelligent forms automation solutions.

Automatic allergen management system

The solution offered by PCS and powered by LiquidOffice andTeleForm was robust enough to handle their growing volumes but
simple enough for staff to use and manage.

Benefits
Top marks in digital transformation
At the start of the 2016/17 school year, CMS launched its new
end-to-end allergy management system. Incoming documents,including the diet order form, are scanned in and all outgoing
documents such as confirmations and menu plans are handled
automatically via the system. The Child Nutrition Services
department has seen dramatic benefits with OpenText intelligent
forms automation, including process acceleration, cost reduction,and lowered risk.

Automated processes save significant time
The once cumbersome, paper-based process of managing
special dietary requests is now a smooth, automated process.
Employing state-of-the-art digital scanning and online processing,
the solution facilitates communication between doctors, nurses,dieticians, managers, and staff, and integrates nutrition requirements,menus, and point-of-sale (POS) systems. Dusty Swan, ProductManager, PcsForms explains, “It used to take CMS an extraordinary
amount of time to generate letters and custom menus. They had ahuge spreadsheet for more than 900 students at 170 schools, which
they emailed to each site manager individually. For each student,
they would generate a new Microsoft Word document and attach
the applicable doctors’ note. The Teleform AutoMerge Publisherfeature allows them to customize it for one set of allergies based on
the record, automating the process and cutting down dramaticallyon manual work.”®

Managing special dietary requests for students used to be a Liliana Myers, Dietetic Technician at CMS, describes the speed
particularly manual and time-consuming task for CMS. The of the new solution: “I used to process 10 to 12 of the simple dietprocess hinges on the Diet Order form, which lists a student’s order forms in a day, but now I can do more than 20 in an hour.
allergies and dietary restrictions, and must be signed by a doctor. The process now involves simply scanning the incoming orders,
In recent years, increasing numbers of students required dietary verifying the allergens in the system, merging records and thenmodifications, leaving CMS staff overwhelmed by the Diet Order sending out a batch of pre-formatted emails.” Cameron continues,submissions. “We typically receive 1,200 to 1,300 Diet Order forms “Being able to scan the diet orders eliminated another cumbersome
in the first six weeks of school. The stack of papers is huge. The part of the process which was managing the mass of paper thatcomplicated ones take much longer than the simple ones, so we was flooding our fax machine and courier mail. We can get themwere hoping to be able to process the simple ones more efficiently scanned so much faster than doing it by hand. When I look at lastin a batch,” says Margaret Cameron, Wellness and Marketing year versus this year, my time was down by more than half.”
Specialist at CMS.

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M AT I O N M A N A G E M E N T

SUCCESS STORY

Another manual step in the data capture process that has been to focus on value-added activities such as enhanced service.
automated is the tracking of food ingredients. Today, the team “We’re able to provide more verbal support to the managers. They
can scan ingredient labels and the solution automatically receive written instructions, but we have time now to address
reads allergen information extracted from the ingredients list. more complicated cases over the phone. In the past, there might
It integrates that with menu planning to highlight menu items that have been uncertainty, and we couldn’t address those concerns
conflict with allergies. “Once it reads the ingredients, it finds all of quickly. Freeing up my time has enabled me to instruct managers
the different allergens that they track and automatically checks personally, which has been really helpful for them,” explains Cameron.
them off. That saves a lot of time,” says Swan.
In the past, the team used a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet andmanually marked every ingredient from each food label. Now, theyscan the labels and the solution tells them which allergens arepresent. It reduces the time spent in half.
®

Bonus marks for surpassing expectations®

Building on the success of the special diet program, CMS applied
the OpenText intelligent forms automation solution to its Summer
Food Service Program. With close to 200 sites providing foodservices every summer, CMS wanted to improve the site registration
process, which was taking one person three months every spring.
Tracking and auditing enables process visibility, reduces risks“Therewas a sign-up process with a lot of paper that had to be
Another key benefit of accurate data capture has been theaudit trail that staff can now follow. The liability risk associated managed,” says Beam. Now, the registration process is online
with managing students’ allergies and special diets is extremely and is already yielding positive results. “It was deployed just thishigh, and documentation is critical. Cameron describes how the week, and we already have customers signed up. In fact, the teamsolution helped with a recent concern over a student’s allergies: has seen faster responses than when they used to send a large“I was able to go to the database and search for the student. paper application packet,” reports Beam.
Everything was right there. I found where I had typed in my notes,Future
the phone conversations that I had with the mother and the doctor,
the Diet Order form, the supporting documents, and the letters As the CMS school board looks to the future, Child Nutrition
and menus that we sent via email to the manager and the parents. Services is seeking out other opportunities to streamline data
I was able to show exactly what we did and why. We could be capture and workflow processes. “I’m very interested in what
confident that we had done the right thing since all the information else we might take a look at, given the success of the Diet Orders
and Summer Food Service Program,” says Beam. A document
was in one place with a full audit trail available.”
management system to more efficiently store the significant
Improved customer service
volume of documents may also be on the menu. The team isWith all the information at their fingertips, the team can provide committed to taking whatever steps are necessary to fulfill its
better service to stakeholders. The time savings also allow staff goal of healthy and safe nutrition for its students.

PCS Revenue Control Systems is a leader in school food and nutrition technology, providing a complete and fully integrated line ofproducts and services to the K-12 market. System solutions include; PcsForms – Student Allergen and Special Diet Management, Free &Reduced Scanning and Web Apps, Catering Management, School Inspections, Household Surveys, and digital document management
for and business process; PayPAMS – Parent Portal for Web Pre-payment and Free and Reduced Meal Applications; POSNOW – Pointof Sale, Vending, Payment Kiosks, Meal Accountability, Claims, and enrollment interfaces; TrakNOW – Menu Planning, Production andNutrition, Supply Chain Management, Inventory Management, Central Kitchen and Central Distribution. Sales and support services areprovided nationwide through regional offices and corporate offices located in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

www.opentext.com/contact
Copyright ©2017 Open Text. OpenText is a trademark or registered trademark of Open Text. The list of trademarks is not exhaustive of other trademarks. Registered trademarks, product names,company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text. All rights reserved. For more information, visit: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/site-copyright.html