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Your students and faculty are the heart and soul of your educational institution. From K-12 to higher education, the importance of keeping your students and faculty safe and happy is your number one priority. There are many processes and tools that help you as an administrator keep your students and faculty a priority. One process that some administrators overlook when it comes to their schools is document management.
Document management is a unique process used to capture, track, store, and move documents from the beginning of their lifecycle to the end. You may already have a document management process in place. However, if you are still using paper-based documents and processes for your document management, you are limiting your students and faculty from the robust features of a document management system (DMS). Throughout this blog we will talk through reasons why a document management system will help your students and faculty have a better overall experience.
What is a Document Management System
Let’s start off with talking about what exactly a document management system is. A document management system (DMS) is a system that enables you to store documents electronically so that you are able to easily retrieve, share, track, revise, and distribute documents and the information they contain. The main difference between paper-based document management and using a document management system is that a DMS provides you with features that streamline your documents and keep better overall control of them.
So how does that help your students and faculty? Well think about all the internal and external processes that involve some sort of document. Applications, student records, faculty records, grants, audits, and more. All these processes are important not only to your school but to your students and employees. Streamlining these processes and allowing for easy retrieval can save your students and faculty time while also saving your school money.
Centralized Records and Easy Retrieval
Running any educational institution comes with a lot of records. Student records and faculty records are some of the more important documents you keep and ones you want to easily retrieve. If you still have paper-based documents stored in filing cabinets, it takes time for your administrators to retrieve these documents no matter how well they are filed. With a DMS, these documents are stored digitally in a centralized location, with retrieval times measured in seconds.
What if you are in higher education and have thousands of students and faculty? Even if all records and documents are stored in a centralized location you still don’t have the time to go through all those documents just to find a particular student or faculty member’s information. That is where a DMS indexing feature comes in. Once your documents are scanned and in digital format, you are now able to index them. Indexing your documents makes them searchable by the keywords you used to index them. This isn’t only beneficial to your faculty but your students as well. Although they may not be the ones retrieving these documents, fast retrieval time makes their experience getting information easy and efficient.
Applications
Although not all schools need applications to get in, most schools have an application process for incoming teachers. Whether it be a college or teacher application, these documents hold important information for your institution to grow. You want the application process to be just as easy for you and your team as it would be for students and incoming faculty. If you aren’t able to have a streamlined process for your applications, that could take a heavy toll on your overall enrollment.
There are many people involved with the application process, student or faculty. You may need multiple people to add notes, make edits, etc. to get all the input and information you need to keep the process moving forward. Without a DMS it will be difficult to keep track of all the notes and comments made about a document, especially if you had to make copies of it to share. With a DMS you have the ability to share the application across all departments without having to make copies. It also gives you full visibility to any edits or notes made on the document itself. With all these features you are able to streamline the process and allow for more timely responses for students as well as save time for your faculty.
Environmental Impact
There are many concerns throughout the entire education system about the current state of our environment and ways we as educators can help. Paper is one of the least sustainable business items that causes detrimental damage to our environment. According to a study done by Edutopia the average school uses approximately 250,000 pieces of paper per school year. Many students and faculty are pushing more and more schools to implement more environmentally- friendly procedures and tools. Some students and faculty may not even attend a school if it doesn’t show the effort to help the environment.
By using a DMS you are drastically decreasing the amount of paper used within your school. At first glance this may not seem like it would benefit your students or faculty but when you look back at the big picture, it is. It shows them that not only do you care about the environment but you care about their future and keeping that environment safe and clean for them.
Information Security
This might seem obvious but losing or misplacing any document within the education system is detrimental. Your students and staff are trusting you with their information, you want to make sure that every possible security feature is in place so that you never have to deal with situations like that. With a DMS you can make it so that only authorized users can get in to see your documents. There are also security features that you aren’t able to have with paper-based processes. You can set restrictions on certain documents so that only the people who need to see them can. You have a full audit trail to get full visibility of the lifecycle of your document. You want to put your students and faculty’s safety first, and you can’t do that without a DMS.
Next Steps
Your students and faculty are the heart and soul of any educational institution. Without them, you wouldn’t have a teacher or anyone to teach. Which is why implementing a document management system is important because it allows your school to take that extra step in helping your students and faculty. Here at Mindwrap we have helped a number of schools both in higher education and K-12 transform their document management. If you need help getting started please contact us today!
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