Digital Document management for City College Birmingham

Document Manager improves staff efficiency at City College Birmingham

The college's East Birmingham campus was being relocated to a new state-of-the-art campus. The new Fordrough campus is a result of a partnership between City College Birmingham and the Learning and Skills Council. To compliment the new campus the college wished to introduce a state-of-the-art document management system.

Finding and sharing documents in 60 teaching locations

The college was looking for an overall strategy to reduce its costs, streamline its processes and reduce its carbon footprint.

The college operates across multiple sites, with a total of 10 college locations and 50-60 remote delivery locations. The college had previously managed all its records as paper files and had built up 10 teaching rooms full of archive material. As well as a desire to improve efficiency, the college was moving to a new main campus where storage space would be considerably reduced.

Another issue facing the college was that their enrolment forms consisted of a three part carbonated form that, was hard to keep copies of, so they decided to change to a one-page A3 double-sided sheet. They needed this change to happen within a six-week time period to be ready for the beginning of term time.

Choosing Document Manager

The college received quotes from three suppliers based on a requirements specification. The college compared the functionality, infrastructure and features of the three solutions before selecting Document Manager.

As an existing customer, they were re-assured by the prompt, effective and flexible support they had received in the past for their student attendance management solution.

As a demanding user of the systems they implement, a pro-active relationship with their supplier was also important to them, and they felt Document Logistix could be relied on to deliver a high level of service.

Benefits of Document Manager

1. Ease of use
2. Simple integration with existing portal system
3. Highly configurable, meeting needs of other business areas such as Finance, HR and Governance records
4. Multi-site access to documents for users in any one of 60 locations
5. Enquiries can be dealt with more quickly
6. Significant reduction of paper and re-printing costs
7. Tight control of document security with a multi-layered security model

The Document Manager Solution

Document Manager is a powerful and comprehensive archiving and document workflow software solution that goes far beyond the conventional capture and storage of documents. It centrally manages the flow of documents through an organisation, maintaining constant document and user security by controlling who can have access to specific documents and files. It provides tight control of file and document editing – yet provides immediate on-line access to those who are authorised – all under a highly disciplined central control regime.

The Audit feature was highly important to the college, which is subject to annual audits that were previously very time-consuming. The college is now able to give auditors direct access to Document Manager and they are able to sample records without their team first having to find and extract the documents. This saved two man days work for college staff.

The college found Document Manager (EDM/DMS) software to be simple to deploy and use, but also rich with additional features that will allow them to develop its use over time.

The implementation was straight forward and very well supported by an experienced consultant with knowledge of the sector and client needs. College staff quickly became confident users of the software.

Future roll-out plans for the college

1. Document Manager will be implemented to hold employer records linked to the Train to Gain scheme
2. Document Manager will be deployed to support Work Based Learning – linked to Capita's UNIT-e Vocational Qualification Management and Tracking system and CRM solutions
3. Document Manager will be integrated with a Symmetry Finance System
4. Document Manager will be deployed to streamline the colleges HR records

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