Education administration and management has always been a paper-heavy field. From admissions and student registration, to financial aid, human resources and accounting, the industry has traditionally relied on paper documents to get things done. The advent of e-textbooks and tablet readers is already revolutionizing the classroom, yet the administrative side of the industry still mostly relies on the same unwieldy paper-driven processes.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can streamline just about any system related to content, document and records management, making an K-12 district-wide document management strategy is an absolute necessity for the future of education. Here are 4 ways an ECM solution can transform your school:
It Cuts Down on Paper Costs
The average school spends anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a year on paper alone. Meaning that the implementation of even a partial ECM strategy can significantly cut down on costs, freeing up room in your school’s tight budget for more important resources. Removing paper additionally frees up the physical space needed to store and manage the paper. What could your district do with the additional space created by removing filing cabinets?
It Streamlines the Admissions Process
Going electronic allows you to streamline workflow and better manage the admissions process by automating document creation, delivery, and filing. This results in faster decisions and approvals, and it also eliminates the problems of lost, misplaced, or incorrectly filed paperwork that are all too common with manual, paper-based processes.
It Streamlines the Payroll Process
Manual payroll is messy, time consuming and generally frustrating for everyone involved. An integrated ECM payroll solution can help automate your payroll process so that faculty, administrators and staff are paid accurately and on time while granting you total control and flexibility over every detail of the payroll process, helping you to avoid things like redundancy, delayed payments and expense report oversights.
Manual payroll is messy, time consuming and generally frustrating for everyone involved. Integrating ECM with your payroll solution can help fully automate your payroll process. This means faculty, administrators and staff have secure access to their payroll records without having to ask the Payroll department.
It Modernizes Student-Centric Processes
Today’s students have been raised on technology, meaning that for the most part, manual paperwork is utterly foreign to them. Modern students respond much better to online services that they can access at any time, than they do to cumbersome stacks of forms and packets. ECM allows students and/or their parents to submit inquiries, apply for services, and submit documents with just a few clicks on their laptops or tablets, which in turn makes things faster and easier on administration as well.
In short, a properly implemented ECM strategy will save your district incredible amounts of time and money while improving user satisfaction for both students and administrators alike. Find out what an ECM system can do for you, and bring your institution into the modern era.