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St Johns University NY increases admission applications using DataBanks document management services
Date: 30/05/2008
St. John's University based in Queens, New York has recently outsourced the process of admissions applications to service provider DataBank.
Passing this manual process on to a service provider who focus in document management and document scanning has now produced a 65% increase in processing applications over a period of five years.
Implementing
Information Technology and applications staff were aware that there were processes which could improve several departments’ methods and productivity. Working with the staff in those departments, the director and staff began the changes by first understanding and analysing their current processes.
It was in the Admissions department first of all that St. John's decided to begin implementing an in-house solution to take care of all mailroom operations and document scanning.
Service provider DataBank was chosen to provide the consulting and professional services required to integrate a document capture system using regular document scanning. But over time the University realised the time and labour taken to capture all the documents was too intense and decided to outsource the entire workflow to DataBank.
St John’s required a company that could manage their requirements and understood the processes well while also being capable of handling more application processing when they expand and grow.
DataBank were more than happy to accommodate these needs having already aided with similar document management solutions and scanning services to other colleges and universities - including Northeastern University, Carnegie Mellon and Boston College.
DataBank acts as the digital mail room for any applications submitted to St, John's while identifying over thirty document types and their indexing requirements. Documents are grouped by applicant, even identifying which documents are originals and which are copies. Scanning of all documents is done on the latest Kodak high speed production scanners which include integrated image processing software. All data is then uploaded to the University's network where processing by Banner® software takes place.
The Result
St. John's University now has a paperless office of admissions. DataBank has helped in the elimination of lost and misplaced documents, removed the requirement to hire and train temporary staff, while existing staff can focus on more important tasks, at the same time improving the student selection process. With these processes in place the University are now looking to implement a similar process into its finance department and achieve the same improved long term results.
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