ASI’s new Information Request e-Form and e-Workflow process enables ASI to help more families in the state of Illinois.

Business Situation

ASI's mission is to improve the lives of Illinois individuals and families affected by autism spectrum disorders. An important part of that is providing our citizens with accurate information. Requests come daily from parents, teachers, grandparents, etc via phone, voice message and email. ASI employees call back the individual with a blank IR (Information Request) paper form in hand and asks a series of questions. The IR is then routed to the ASI employee best suited to respond to the person’s specific situation and provide material to help the family. Completed IRs are stored in a file cabinet. Many citizens reach out to their Legislators and teachers who may not have enough knowledge to help. This results in affected individuals and families going without help.

Challenges

• An ASI employee must call back anyone requesting information and interview them to collect the vital information needed to process an IR.
• Citizens would like 24x7 ability to request information when it’s urgent for them.
• IR forms are manually routed among the ASI staff. Sometimes paper gets lost in the paper shuffle or delays a response.
• Citizens sometimes go without help when reaching out to Legislators and teachers who do not have easy and/or anonymous ways to request information.
• No audit trail exists to track who is working on each IR and what stage it is in.
• The time consuming process of manually extracting data from each IR into a Excel Spreadsheet is often skipped. This limits ASI's ability to mine the IR data to understand trends, request government funding and add or improve services.

Why frevvo Live Forms

• frevvo and Datamations’s track record of successfully delivering "Go Paperless" projects.
• The convenience of an electronic workflow to enable ASI to check the status of any IR anywhere along the process.
• The Forms/Workflows Designer is easy to use by non-programmers enabling anyone to make changes to the IR form when and as they need.
• The form enforces data validation thereby eliminating errors and ensuring all required fields are filled.
• The forms are easy to find on ASI’s website and available 24x7
• Citizens can now fill in the IR themselves leading to more complete and accurate data and ability for ASI to respond faster to requests without need for a phone interview.
• Legislator’s now have desktop links to IR form making it easy to help citizens connect to ASI to get the help they need
• Legislators who submit IRs on behalf of a family are automatically notified when the request is complete giving them a positive feedback loop that they made difference to a family in need.
• Teachers now have easy access to request information to improve their knowledge of Autism and the challenges their students are facing.
• The forms automatically collect data from each IR forms into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The data is mined for government grant requests to expand and improve services.
• Built-in integration with PaperVision eliminates paper storage and provides easy online access to competed IRs.

The Results

Together frevvo and Datamation delivered an electronic workflow solution that can be updated and maintained by the less technical ASI staff.