Azusa USD Streamlines Requisitions
Nearly 8,300 students attend Azusa Unified School District (AUSD), which include 11 elementary, three middle, one K-8 and three high schools, as well as an Adult School and Alternative Education school. The student-centered program emphasizes a curriculum aligned with California Standards, enrichment classes and a commitment to educational technology. AUSD also offers a Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, special programs for at-risk students and an extensive special-education program.
Summary
Helios has helped AUSD transformed its processes to go paperless by electronically streamlining their HR processes, including workflows, requisitions, sub finder, onboarding, time sheets, time reporting, leave balances and board reports.
Challenges
AUSD was looking for a solution that would support easy communication, time reporting, and personnel requests. AUSD had a home-grown system previously and they felt the need to have something more robust off the shelf solution. Considering 85% of their district budget is directed towards personnel, it was important having a solution powerful enough to support staff of their size. Another need was keeping track of approved hours versus paid hours for payroll reporting.
AUSD Chooses Helios for its Interfacing and Rich Feature Set
Frustrated by these challenges, AUSD evaluated several comparable systems in the market and finally chose Helios. As Marc Bommarito, Assistant Superintendent of Business Services puts it, “The number one reason we chose Helios was our staff didn’t have to do double data entry because Helios pulls from our county database.” Helios offers AUSD workflows, requisitions, sub finder, onboarding, time sheets, time reporting, leave balances, and board reports.
AUSD Staff Benefit from Helios
One of the first home runs has been Helios transforming the extra duty and personnel requisition process. With Helios, these forms and approval process are now completely electronic and paperless. The forms get routed to the correct approvers. Once approved, staff can run board reports easily from that data.
Prior to Helios, it would take a long time for district staff to compile board reports. With Helios, HR department has saved a lot of time with the board report alone. Meghna Bulsara, Director of Fiscal Services, loves that Helios saves them tons of time by instantly generating reports, saying, “It would take a long time to compile a Board report, but, with Helios, it’s just a couple of clicks to generate one every time.”
Helios has delivered a customized solution to meet Azusa’s specific needs. Following the form approvals, time sheets get generated and approved in Helios. Clean and verified data gets on the time sheets, which has made the jobs of Payroll and Finance much easier. Mr. Bommarito is excited about the capabilities of Helios to adapt to their district’s needs. “There are not too many systems that can customize for us to meet our district needs and Helios has done that,” he says.
The Helios Employee Portal enables employees to easily see how much sick and vacation time they’ve earned and used. Ms. Bulsara also applauds Helios for their great customer support, saying anytime they receive an immediate response anytime they contact Helios with questions.
Overall, Helios has helped the district’s business, payroll, and HR departments, as well as the school sites. Everyone is able to view the information they need when they need it and the district has achieved this without any data entry upfront.
Mr. Bommarito summarizes their use of Helios by saying:
“Helios is a great option and it connects to everything. The big win for us has been data integrity. That’s going to help us on the budgeting side to know how and what we’re spending our extra duty on. That saves us money in the end!”