Caspar Herzberg |
Schools and higher education institutions are challenged to meet various goals, from driving recruitment to managing student and employee information securely, maintaining and raising funding, and developing stronger programmes for students and staff. If there’s any industry that is used to handling a lot of paperwork, it’s the education sector. Schools, universities, colleges and other educational organisations manage human resources forms, student records, state education compliance documents, and class/curriculum forms. This information is primarily stored on paper, so the processes to manage it are typically manual, inefficient, inaccurate and ineffective.
These archaic processes result in high paper storage and labour costs, lost and misfiled documents, tedious procedures that take up valuable employee time, and the risk of non-compliance and security issues. While an automated workflow solution, like MetaViewer form Metafile Information Systems, may seem disruptive to the procedures that an educational institution has had in place for decades, we encourage these organisations to embrace the disruption and replace their laggard process with a new, automated one.
Metafile has deployed automated document management in a variety of educational settings, from accounts payable and accounts receivable departments, to human resources departments. Integrating an automated solution into their existing business software solutions has allowed these institutions to improve how they access and manage student and staff data. They can now automatically collect, route and store student admission forms, human resources forms, report cards, standardised tests, payroll, meeting notes and other documentation. This has made it easier for the institutions to safeguard sensitive information and ensure compliance with record retention requirements.
Automating document management has also improved the institutions’ relationships with students, their parents, staff and vendors because it is now able to respond to queries and approve documents more quickly. Meanwhile, employees can use work more effectively by reallocating time previously spent on manual tasks to more crucial ones.
Just like any other business, educational institutions need to be agile, tech-savvy and strategic in their software investments. A paperless automation solution is the key to helping schools and universities get on track towards proactively managing information and data better and more securely. It’s time for educational organisations to turn the roles around and let the document management experts teach them so they can become more data-driven organisations.
Click here to read the original version of this blog post by Alyssa Putzer, marketing communications specialist at Metafile Information Systems.