Fairfax County Sends webMethods to School

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), the 12th largest school system in the U.S., has selected the webMethods integration platform to implement a scalable integration solution that can grow with the information systems of the school district.

Currently, there are more than 30 major information systems in use at FCPS, including: human resources, payroll, financials, procurement, library system, student information system, food services, and transportation. For the student information system alone, there are more than 200 servers that house everything from grades to demographic information.

As FCPS continues to update and implement more strategic solutions to advance instructional goals, the Fairfax, Va.-based webMethods will provide the integration backbone that connects the disparate applications.

Also, the webMethods integration platform will allow new opportunities for automation that can cut across organizations and systems by incorporating human workflow capabilities to reduce the more than nine million paper forms distributed each year at FCPS. The human workflow capabilities are built into the webMethods integration platform, allowing business process automation to include human intervention for such tasks as manual approvals.

Currently, there are more than 700 different types of paper documents used throughout the 234 schools in the county. For example, to coordinate a single field trip, approval forms are routed manually from the teacher to the principal, and to the transportation and financial offices. This manual process is repeated approximately 16,000 times in the course of one school year. The webMethods integration platform will help streamline these business processes and others through enhanced integration of enterprise applications.

“webMethods is excited to work with our local school district to achieve educational excellence through integration technology. An integrated enterprise reduces complexities and eliminates administrative redundancies from business processes, thereby allowing the staff of Fairfax County Public Schools to focus its resources on the more important goals of education,” said David Mitchell, president and chief operating officer of webMethods.”