Caspar Herzberg |
This article first appeared in the
Winter 2017 issue of The Record.
When it comes to making an educational institution more efficient and cost-effective, it’s important to turn to an A-grade solution. School districts collect copious amounts of data on students, teaching staff and administrators, but most don’t have the document management/paperless automation solutions to enable them to take advantage of this valuable information.
No longer limited to financial institutions and accounts payable, document management solutions can be implemented across several areas of an educational institution to constantly gather, analyse and store information. These solutions have helped colleges, universities and school districts to streamline business and educational processes, increase efficiency and provide better visibility of – and access to – available data.
Many school employees have enjoyed a host of efficiency gains by implementing a document management tool with their enterprise resource planning solutions. They have captured mainframe report outputs, student transcripts and billing information, which is collected via built-in optical character recognition capabilities. In addition, schools have automated AP and other processes, centralised documentation processes for entire school districts and minimised paper and printing costs.
Education budgets are tight and school districts have cut costs and improved business practices by implementing technology that captures, analyses and files documents without the need for manual intervention. Process automation reduces storage costs and allows district employees to focus on more pertinent tasks that will improve the educational experience of students, teachers and administrators.
From streamlining student admissions to increasing visibility of financial requirements, human resources and classroom processes – there are many benefits of paperless automation/document management. Importantly, these solutions store critical and confidential information digitally, safeguarding it from being misfiled, physically destroyed, or accessed by unauthorised users. Files are also available from anywhere at any time.
Every institution needs to handle information properly and have the most relevant processes in place to safeguard student information. Whether people are managing information for a college or university, school district or specific educational programme or institute, they know that data is their most valuable tool for providing the most relevant and valuable educational experience for students, administrators, teachers, employees, vendors and beyond.
Alyssa Putzer is a marketing communications specialist at Metafile Information Systems