In Greene County, Ohio, the Greene County Educational Service Center provides and administers programs and services for special–needs and at–risk students spanning seven school districts. With a staff of about 170 employees, time and labor are both at a premium for the Center, with FileMaker Pro databases helping to ensure timely and dependable delivery and documentation of needed services.

Business Challenge

The Greene County Educational Service Center is a bustling, fast–moving operation, with Director of Organizational Services Dr. Ron Anderson working to keep up with the needs of its client schools. "Not only do we provide direct services to students, such as speech therapy, occupational and physical therapy, school psychological evaluations, and mental health therapy," he notes, "but we also operate several satellite school programs, including the Greene County Learning Center, the Academy of Greene County, Camp Birch, and various preschool sites, for severely emotionally handicapped students, preschool students, or students who are at risk for school failure."

Such programs have demanding record–keeping requirements, and Ron learned early on how FileMaker Pro could help keep that data in motion. "We've been using FileMaker Pro since 2002," he explains, "when I first attended a one–day training session. Realizing the potential for use in our organization, I continued to learn about FileMaker, and in December 2004 I attended a FileMaker Pro professional training program in Atlanta with Chris Moyer, The Moyer Group."

Successful Solution

The Greene County Educational Service Center's FileMaker Pro database systems cover a broad range of essential internal functions, from basic record keeping to compliance with complicated regulatory demands. The Mental Health Services unit utilizes the most impressive component of the system to ensure revenue reimbursement for services provided, a function which requires strict compliance with Medicaid regulations. Restructured in 2004 by Ron himself, this database provides all the information necessary for accurate record keeping at the touch of a button.

Other FileMaker Pro databases in use at the Center handle such tasks as employee and student record management, caseload scheduling for staff professionals, and compulsory curriculum mapping as required by Ohio state special–education standards. The databases contain hundreds of thousands of individual records, with over 60 employees accessing and operating the system.

We continue to use FileMaker Pro because it's affordable for our organization and doesn't require an expensive IT operation to keep it running.

— Dr. Ron Anderson, Director of Organizational Development, Greene County Educational Service Center

Customer Benefits

Easy operation and simplified development in FileMaker Pro means real savings across the board — tasks like creating an employee directory, which formerly took up to three days to complete, can now be accomplished in five minutes. And in public education, every dollar and every minute counts. "Using FileMaker Pro, we've trimmed weeks of work from many employees' jobs," Ron explains, "resulting in cost savings and increased productivity. Employee directories are created in seconds rather than days, Licensure Expiration letters are created in seconds rather than weeks, workshop materials such as nametags and certificates are created in seconds rather than hours. I could go on and on about time savings!"

Nowhere is the value of time saving more apparent than in the enhancement of the Mental Health Unit's database. "Because our old solutions had been developed by several consultants over time, no one knew each specific table in which changes had been made," Ron recalls. "It had become chaos. But the enhanced relational tools in FileMaker Pro allowed us to integrate dozens of tables that were previously independent. And creating relationships is easy — with one mouse click you connect a key field in one table with its foreign field in another. This feature alone saves hours."

That improvement means both faster updating and that, in turn, means that reimbursements come in faster than ever before. "The Mental Health unit was able to triple the revenue they generated in the first month using the new FileMaker Pro solution I developed," continues Ron, "and the revenue continues to come in at that level." The statistics for the last half of calendar year 2005 bear up Ron's predictions — showing a bottom–line jump of over 218% over the revenue figures for the same period in 2004, for an increase of over $206,000.

The Center's initial investment in FileMaker Pro repays itself regularly through smoother operation, increased revenue, and more productive, happier employees. "We continue to use FileMaker Pro, " Ron declares, "because it's affordable for our organization and doesn't require an expensive IT operation to keep it running."