The Chichester College Group is the largest provider of further education in Sussex. Through its Colleges the Group educates and trains around 25,000 full and part time students every year and provides teaching excellence to meet the future needs of the regions' employers.

Even though Chichester College Group was initially driven by a green initiative to go paperless, in 2017 the college merged with Crawley College; a merger which asked stern questions of the current management of the college's paper-based systems. The shift to digital would be a daunting but necessary one, especially within an organisation that relies so heavily on paper-based systems.

Chichester College Group recognised that to cope with the rising flow of paper documents resulting from various acquisitions, they would need to digitise fast and find one solution to incorporate document and content capture, a robust document repository, information retrieval and storage, and track & control of documents across all of their campuses.

They didn't know it at the time, but COVID-19 would mean staff needed instant, seamless and secure access to critical documents when working from home.

"Our Chief Executive looked at the current environmental conditions and determined that it was our responsibility to make a stronger effort to go paperless, especially with additional college mergers on the horizon," explained Sara Barrett, the Group's HR Project Coordinator. "The goal was to decrease our reliance on paper-based systems and processes whilst exceeding our already high levels of compliance, all within a cost-effective manner. Educational institutions' budgets are usually on a shoestring, so we knew we had to be as resourceful as possible."

Chichester College Group had several objectives for their new Document Management system, within various departments. Employee records and student records had previously been printed, signed, scanned and stored in bulging filing cabinets; consequently, documents were time consuming to process and access. The amount of printing also contributed negatively to the College's environmental commitments.

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"At our fingertips, is how I'd describe employee data now. Being able to drag and drop documents from Outlook into trays has been a real game changer. We have streamlined access to documents and improved information flow, all whilst maintaining the ability to track, edit and retrieve documents in a GDPR compliant fashion."

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CLOUD APPROACH SOLVED PROBLEMS
In 2018, Chichester College Group deployed DocuWare to re-engineer some long-standing, antiquated paper-based processes, improve compliance, increase storage and encourage some new, greener ways of thinking. The solution was implemented within a busy HR department first, to handle employee personnel files, ensuring that employee data is equally as quick to search as it is quick to retrieve.

"At our fingertips, is how I'd describe employee data now. Being able to drag and drop documents from Outlook into trays has been a real game changer," Sara went on to say. "We have streamlined access to documents and improved information flow, all whilst maintaining the ability to track, edit and retrieve documents in a GDPR compliant fashion."

The number of documents that are now managed digitally is in the thousands, so the college has hit their objective of reducing the negative environmental impact and made huge cost savings on paper, printer cartridges and other consumables. The HR Department has quick, easy access to important employee documentation which helps to enhance business continuity by ensuring documents are easily accessible in a disaster recovery situation.

In 2019, Chichester College Group also implemented DocuWare within some of the college's other departments including student records and their executive office, primarily for storing contractual paperwork within the cloud. Sara explained further: "We had one corridor which was lined with locked filing cabinets - all departments had contributed to this. Even though it was a mammoth task to scan all those documents, we desperately needed the contents of those filing cabinets to be stored safely within the cloud, ensuring we had a higher level of data security as well as being more efficient with the data we held."

CHANGING MINDSETS
DocuWare has helped Chichester College Group in an operational sense by hitting their key objectives, but it has also had a hand in changing mindsets across a range of departments. Rethinking paper-driven processes has really helped them identify inefficiencies and re-imagine how different processes within other departments could work more efficiently. Sara said "We merged with another college (Worthing College) pretty much immediately after implementing the DocuWare solution, so we were able to assist them really well with the scanning of their documents into our community."

Chichester College Group was, and continues to be, going through a period of transition; proposed mergers with other local colleges mean the requirements for storage change on a regular basis, as do the volume of users. "Currently we have 25 users across all the campuses, but the real unforeseen benefit of DocuWare was being able to access this data from home without using a VPN. A lot of the work just couldn't have been done by staff over the lockdown period, so we've managed to avoid a really difficult situation," Sara said.

The HR department are lucky enough to benefit from well-trained, hands-on staff and have found getting used to DocuWare straightforward. In fact, the team regularly share hints and tips with each other and have created a comprehensive best practice policy. Sara concluded: "We've learned so much throughout this journey and things are running more smoothly than they ever have. Of course, we've discovered our own dos and don'ts and the way we deploy DocuWare is now quite bespoke in a way".

The Chichester College Group roadmap is merger driven. The Group expects to go from strength to strength in its document management journey with additional storage and implementation into the Sales & Marketing departments and the Estates and Facilities Management departments

More info: www.docuware.com