Document Management Case Study.
Document Management for
Gateway Sixth Form college
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Document Logistix gets top grades for taking Gateway paperless.
Located in Hamilton, Leicester, Gateway college’s mission is to make a positive and lasting contribution to the lifelong learning of the people of Leicester and Leicestershire aged 16 and over.
The college employs 180 staff and aims to have over 1,250 students on the roll each year.
The college was moving from its Leicester city centre campus to a new campus outside the city centre at Hamilton that did not provide any archive room for paper documents. The college generates a great deal of paperwork and due to the relocation there was an urgent need to reduce the amount of paper being kept. Considerable saving would be realised by eliminating the need to transport records to the new site and house them in expensive storage.
The college also needed to improve the availability of information for all of its staff. Despite student records and documents being held, in many departments around the college, often in duplicate,they frequently remained inaccesible to key staff.
The college also had a goal of achieveing more environmentally sustainable business practices including reducing its paper usage.
Choosing Document Manager
“The college looked in detail at a wide range of Document Management (DM) solutions. Some solutions were very, very expensive and very complicated to use. These solutions were probably designed for very large organisations, but they were too expensive for the college’s budget. Other systems seemed cheap and cheerful and probably would not have been able to cope with the college’s quite varied requirements. Document Manager struck the right balance of price and functionality. It allowed us to start off small and grow as we needed to.” said Paul Taylor, Network and Corporate Data Manager.
Document Manager's unique modular document management solution allowed the college to start with quite a narrow deployment and then roll out the DM solution department by department. The software was able to be deployed incrementally to improve the efficiency of each of the college’s internal processes, such as enrollment.
Benefits of Document Manager
- Reduction of paper usage and storage
- Improved staff efficiency
- Streamlined business processes, such as enrollment
- Indexing of documents via barcode
- Administration tools allow easy set-up and deployment
- Simple integration with existing business systems
Document Manager™ delivers at Gateway college
The Document Manager system had the flexibility to enable teams and departments around the college to automate their document management and business process in exactly the way that suited their needs. The software has enabled much better use of and wider availability of information across the college.
The Document Manager solution has improved a multitude of business issues and processes. Enrollment has been made paperless and much more efficient. Staff no longer rely on paper documents. Instead there is now a direct link on each student’s bio page within the web portal to the documents held within Document Manager. The Student Services team no longer physically archives student files at the end of the academic year. These documents now remain securely stored and available when needed within the document management system.
“Most users in the college have found Document Manager easy to use. There have been no server issues at all and the speed of the system has been very good.” said Paul Taylor, Network and Corporate Data Manager.
The college intends to continue rolling the Document Manager technology out to improve the efficiency of its operations. “We intend to carry on what we have started and to expand to other areas of the college now that we have settled at our new site” said Paul Taylor, Network and Corporate Data Manager. The future applications of the document management system include taking the Human Resources department paperless. The software will then be employed in digitising the management system used by the Examinations team.
Staff at the college have had nothing but positive feedback for the support given to the solution deployed by the team: “the help desk has been extremely effective and efficient, as have the consultants we have had working on site with us”.
