News and Blog
June 2007

New Strategy for Customer Care
Dateline: Roseville - June 2007 - Barry Collins

We are known throughout the industry as having the best customer care. We KNOW school business and CARE about our customers.

With the advent of Escape Online, we have been stretched, so we have hired new employees and implemented a new strategy for providing the best customer care.

Escape Customer Care now has people positioned in roles to streamline implementations and enhance customer support. The following graphic shows the different roles individuals will play.

  • Project Office - developing and instituting a project management and control framework applicable across all aspects of the project.

  • Project Manager - creating the Project Charter, building and maintaining the project plan, establishing and performing project reporting, directing the project team and managing any required programming efforts.

  • Onsite Consultant - primary on-site liaison with the customer, establishing business processes and working with the Project Manager to ensure project tasks are being performed.

  • Business Analyst - planning and performing data migrations and any related software set-up.

  • Technical Writer - producing documentation, release notes and training materials.

  • Trainer - delivering all training associated with the project; core, end user, customized and internal training.

  • Quality Assurance - unit, baseline and release testing.

  • Customer Support - ongoing support of the system.

Over the next few weeks I will blog more about this new strategy and introduce the individuals we have hired to help us carry it out.

Happy Father's Day!
Dateline: Roseville - June 2007 - Bob Towery

I think if I could be anywhere I liked for Father's Day, it would be on a boat in the beautiful waters of British Columbia. This picture was taken there several years ago. Well, maybe next year when everything is running smoothly with Escape Online?

Help Wanted
Dateline: Roseville - June 2007 - Barry Collins

Escape Technology is growing! Escape Online 5 is LIVE and we are looking for talented individuals to help us train, implement and support it.

Recently, we have been lucky: Robin Dutton returned with all of her previous Escape and technical experience; Julie Dippold joined us fresh from college with intelligence and enthusiasm; and now we have just added Karen Rickman to the team, a seasoned county professional that is going to focus on our XCOE project.

But we want more! We have put ads in local newspapers but it is hard to describe the unique nature of Escape Customer Care. You can imagine the trouble we have. When you mention "customer support," too many think of the untrained, unnamed person on the other end of the line when you call about your cable box not working. Or, you get a lot of "would-be" programmers that would rather open a computer than talk on the phone.

We are so much more! We are widely recognized as having the BEST customer care. Our reps are smart, friendly and always learning, always helping.

Escape Customer Care does all the setup, implementation, testing, training and support related to Escape Online. So, we need are looking for individuals that are smart, have great people skills, good with financials, and are self-directed troubleshooters. Project management and personal organization skills are also critical.

Applicants should have a business or communications degree and experience supporting/training complex accounting/hr applications, preferably in the public sector.

Experience with SQL, .NET, Crystal report development desired, strong PC, communication and time management skills required. Our work environment is team oriented, casual yet challenging. Our market niche is rewarding and fun. Some travel is required.

Migrating County Data
Dateline: Roseville - June 2007 - Robin Duton

We have two all-inclusive county implementations happening right now! One is a migration from Escape Classic to Escape Online, and the other is a migration from a third-party system to Escape Online.

Migrating from Escape Classic

Ventura County Office of Education is moving from Escape Classic to Escape Online using a district-by-district method. Basically, they are taking a few districts live at a time. This means that they will have some districts live on Escape Classic and others live on Escape Online simultaneously!

We have worked closely with them to develop a migration plan that will allow them to take districts live independently, but maintain an Escape Online database of ALL organization data regardless of whether a district is live in Escape Classic or Escape Online. Each night, we convert the Escape Classic data to the “inquiry database”, and move Escape Online data from the live database to the inquiry database, to provide the county with the “county-wide” picture in Escape Online.

This allows the County to have Escape Online access to all of their orgs, whether they are live on Escape Online or not. They can run reports and hold training classes for the new orgs coming live. Also, when the orgs are ready to come live the Escape Classic data is already converted, and a one-time migration just needs to occur to the production database and, ta-dah, the org can go live. It makes the transition from Escape Classic to Escape Online very smooth.

Migrating from Another System

Placer County Office of Education is a totally different ball game. They are not Escape Classic customers so we all have a learning curve for terminology. To focus the transition, we are taking all districts live simultaneously in a module-by module method.

To accomplish all of this without the luxury of using our import/export programs for Escape Classic, we have had to take the migration process to a new level.

We are using some of our automated import, some key data entry and some custom stored procedures to get the data into the system. Since it is so "hands on," we decided to take the opportunity to import critical data that districts were tracking in Excel, Access and other programs -- providing PCOE with a truly INTEGRATED system.

The data districts were tracking separately includes CPR certificates, first aid certificates, CLAD/SDAIE and that is just on the HR side! We expect more "extra imports" when we implement Payroll later this year and Finance early next year.

Training Days of Summer
Dateline: Roseville - June 2007 - Robin Duton

The weather is hot and so are the trainings!

Throughout the months of May and June, Escape Technology is providing half-day Topic Training Sessions for Placer County Office of Education HR employee records.

Even though users have already begun entering information, training/review sessions were needed to keep users moving along, using all of the efficiencies in Escape Online.

Two days a week, we have a morning and afternoon training for each topic, like employees, positions, assignments, leaves, credentials, etc.

As you can see, there are usually about 30-40 users in attendance, with Escape's own Kathy Carlson and Julie Dippold guiding users through the software and helping them with exercises.

So far, we have trained a couple hundred users (there are almost 700 users county-wide), imported almost 45,000 employee records and over 8,000 position records.

All of this is in preparation for the go-live date of 7/1. But, in reality, PCOE is already live with much of HR. There is really just a few items to wrap up.

Our next push will be on the Payroll side. We are looking forward to it!