Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Admissions Application Processing: Are You Prepared for the Seasonal Tsunami?

// December 7th, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

Turn paper piles into electronic files

Well, Admissions folks, here’s wishing you a restful holiday season. Come January, you’re going to need a well-stocked reserve of energy. If the recent NACAC report is any indication of operational stress heading your way (and I fully believe it is), application volumes are yet again going to rise – perhaps in record numbers.According to the study, for each of the past 15 years several key metrics have continued to exceed those from the previous year:  number of applications received, percentage of students submitting three or more applications and percentage of students applying to seven or more schools. That’s a recipe for files turning into piles.

How to keep up? Well, if your office has already transformed its operations from paper-based to electronic processing, you may be well positioned to absorb yet another wicked wave of incoming applications.  Not only are you already likely to be scanning application-related supporting documents as they arrive in paper and adding them to the electronic file, but you may also be managing the review and decision process in an electronic, automated fashion.  You may even be further speeding the process by updating the document checklist in your student information system (SIS) automatically, in real-time.

For those offices that haven’t made the transition from paper to electronic processing and routing for review, well…all I can say is that you may want to resolve that the upcoming season will be your last in paper-based application hell.  Unless, that is, you’re truly enamored with time-consuming, staff-draining, decision-delaying tasks such as the following:

• Manually updating  the checklist in your SIS with received documents
• Sifting through folders of miscellaneous, pre-app documents to see if any match newly created student records
• Conducting filing cabinet search parties to locate documents for  answering student inquiries
• Manually managing file completion and routing of paper files for review (involving filing cabinets, color-coded labels, photocopying, campus mail, etc.)

And, speaking of review, the NACAC study shows that, just since 2005, the average number of applications assigned to each counselor for review has risen by a burden-escalating 73%. In a paper-based world, delayed decisions will be hard to avoid. That means more opportunity for those institutions with efficient operations to secure coveted students and meet or exceed their enrollment goals.

Meanwhile, their less prepared competitors will remain weeks behind, still struggling to process paper files and get them in the hands of reviewers. For the slowest of the slow, knowing who is actually in the review pool  may not occur until after the streamlined schools have already been issuing decision letters to that pool.

If you’re one of the laggards, that thought can’t feel good. Make it a New Year’s resolution to join the ranks of the speedy in 2013.

Five Ways to Serve Students by Increasing Transparency

// August 10th, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education, IT, Uncategorized // Tom von Gunden

Recognizing the need to help more students stay on track to degree completion, various stakeholders across higher education are looking for ways to give students clearer roadmaps to the end goal. One such effort comes from the U.S. Department of Education. Recently, the department unveiled the Shopping Sheet, a standardized financial aid award document that includes tools for calculating the cost of the student’s educational path. While institutions’ use of the sheet is voluntary, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to college presidents urging them to adopt it. In that letter, Duncan states, “Our goal is that more students will arrive at school each fall less worried about how they will pay for college and more focused on how they will complete college.”

While I’m not convinced the Shopping Sheet will be in wide use by the kickoff year of 2013-14 (see the lukewarm initial feedback from some financial aid officers), I applaud any effort intended to help students keep their eyes on the prize. And, I see financial aid as just one of several areas in which students would benefit from a clearer picture of what it will take – academically and financially as well as in terms of time. Others include enrollment services more broadly defined to include admissions, registration, advising and billing.

So, to echo the service-minded intentions of the Shopping Sheet, I offer five additional ways to help increase student visibility into the processes and steps critical to successfully navigating the path to degree completion. These processes and steps are mostly on the administrative side, where students are best served when views of the machinery and organizational complexity behind the scenes are kept at a minimum, yet views into financial and academic status are easily and intuitively accessible.

1. Share document tracking checklists (showing documents required, received, not yet submitted) on a student-facing portal. Don’t make students wonder about documents you’ll need for admissions processing, financial aid verification, transfer credit evaluation, course registration, and so on. Work to keep those lists current – updating them in real-time, if possible.

2. Update your student information system (SIS) with receipt of required documents and the status of pending decisions in a timely fashion – again, in real-time, if possible. Also, be sure your document management system allows for instant retrieval of received documents directly from SIS screens. When a student calls any of the enrollment-side offices to check on the receipt of a submitted document or the status of a decision, you’ll want staff to answer questions quickly and accurately on the first call.

3. Move forward with “one-stop shop” and student self-service initiatives. Make sure that staff working your one-stop counters has secure, electronic access to cross-department documents. You’ll want to stop relying on campus mail, photocopying and office-to-office phone searches to share or track down documents. And, you’ll want version control of documents available to staff at one-stop counters.

4. Present bills online. A complement to the Shopping Sheet, which guides students’ understanding of how they’ll pay for their education, online billing provides a convenient way for them to stay on top of what they owe and when they’ll need to pay it to stay enrolled.

5. Arm advisors and registration staff with accurate, up-to-date degree audit information. To keep students on track to an on-time graduation (and not waste financial aid dollars on the wrong or redundant courses), make sure the view of certificate or program completion is crystal clear. I describe this in more detail in a post specifically focused on superior advising.

Like cost calculators such as the Shopping Sheet, the five service-oriented recommendations I’ve outlined above will help your institution provide students with fast, accurate answers in convenient, highly visible ways. As Secretary Duncan states, in describing the need to provide students and parents with clearer insight into education costs, “It starts with transparency.”

Drive Down Administrative Costs to Rev Up Value

// July 26th, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education, IT, Uncategorized // Tom von Gunden

In a recent article, I summarized market forces that will require colleges and universities to demonstrate increased operational efficiency.  Significant among them is the intensified public scrutiny and concern – from taxpayers, tuition payers and various sources of funding and financial aid – about the rising cost of higher education.

While my recommendations in that article focused on enrollment management, stakeholders in every department on campus will need to embrace this scrutiny as a clarion call. As students and parents continue their own belt-tightening amidst continuing economic uncertainty, they are increasingly vigilant in weighing the affordability – and value – of the various institutions with which they consider spending their hard-earned and/or heavily borrowed dollars.

What can you do to make sure your institution doesn’t get cast aside for the wrong reason – cost outweighing perceived value, especially when compared to other schools being considered?

First on the list of ways to sidestep the negative perceptions is to cut costs – especially if you plan to pass the savings along to consumers and leverage your efficiency to satisfy external funders. I suggest starting in administrative areas – enrollment management, yes, but also in finance, HR, advancement, grants management and so on. Why there? In the public’s view, these areas make little contribution to the product being purchased – that is, to the actual education (and eventual degree or certificate).

In turning an investigative eye on administrative inefficiency, you’ll quickly land on things to improve by focusing on the two most heinous abusers of resources, time and money:

1)      Any high-volume, repetitive administrative process that is both mundane and manual (e.g., processing  applications, invoices, contracts and the like)
2)      Any high-volume, repetitive process that remains dependent on paper (typically the chief cause for making #1 above mundane and manual)

In a companion article to the one mentioned at the top of this post, I shine a comparative light on two competing institutions – again, focusing on inefficiencies in enrollment management.  The “losing” school is mired in the kinds of cost-creating barriers to efficiency described here.

If similar examples exist at your school in any administrative area, it’s time for a revamp. As I said, the world of higher education consumers and funders is watching.

In the introduction to its recent report on institutional effectiveness, “Leaders & Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Public Postsecondary Education,” the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, notes the concern-evoking reality that, while the cost of higher education continues to rise, its productivity in terms of generating graduates continues to fall behind.

While acknowledging various reasons for the rising costs, including cuts in funding, the report states that higher prices “also reflect a model of postsecondary education that is expensive, inefficient, and slow to change. “ In making recommendations for ways to drive down the cost per degree completed, the report’s writers suggest more rigorous analysis and accounting “to better isolate the costs of undergraduate education, research, and institutional support.”

I take “institutional support” to include those administrative areas that I’ve suggested serve as your institution’s starting point for a cost-cutting, value-enhancing approach to squeezing out inefficiency.

Five Ways to Improve Financial Aid Processing Turnaround

// June 14th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Admissions, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education, IT, Uncategorized // Tom von Gunden

In most offices under the Enrollment Management umbrella, the volume of work is increasingly daunting.  The document processing needs in offices of Financial Aid are as representative as any when it comes to handling increased demand. The amount of verification documents that must be collected, matched and sent to reviewers is significantly on the rise.

Several factors are driving these increases, most notably the recent shifts in verification practices. Whereas previously, many schools verified only, say, 30% of those selected for verification, now all – not just a portion – of the students selected for verification must be verified at most schools. 

This means collecting, processing and reviewing application-supporting documents, such as tax forms, for many more students than before. Unfortunately, while application and verification numbers are on the rise, staff resources for tackling the increases in volume typically are not. That’s a recipe for bottlenecks and delays. Delays are a problem as the demand for fast turnaround of packaging decisions – a result of heightened expectations for superior student service – is also rising. If your institution is in competition for students (and who isn’t these days?), you must know that students – and for dependent students, their parents as well – are increasingly savvy about playing institutions off one another. They’re weighing the relative value of competing institutions’ awards offers and not always willing to wait for slow-to-respond schools.

Moreover, because of the rising cost of education, more students are enrolling at the school that offers the most attractive financial aid package, whether or not that school was the student’s preferred choice. To those schools not only offering the most attractive packages but also doing so the fastest, the likeliness of more matriculations is high.

So, what can your Financial Aid office to do handle spikes in volume while delivering awards packages faster than other schools?

I suggest five speed-generating, accuracy-ensuring process improvements, all enabled by complementing the student information system (SIS) or financial aid software application with enterprise content management (ECM) technologies:

1. Match incoming verification documents to the student record automatically, with little or no human intervention.
2. Automate file completion and handoff to counselors for verification review.
3. Automatically update student-facing Web portals showing which documents are required and the current status of submitted documents.
4. Send and track electronic notifications to students regarding missing or inaccurate documents required to complete processing and verification.
5. Automatically update the SIS or financial aid software application with information and decisions managed by the ECM platform.

And, here’s a bonus tip for improving student service and protecting funding for Financial Aid: Automate and speed transfer credit evaluation in order to keep students from enrolling in redundant course work. After all, the students and your Financial Aid office have worked to secure those precious financial aid dollars. No sense watching them go to waste.

Don’t Turn Your Admissions Cycle into the Season of Dread

// April 19th, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

Every year, it seems, one or more institutions raise students’ hopes of admission only to dash them with erroneous acceptance announcements. This year is no different. Early in the admissions season, several dozen rejected applicants to Vassar College were greeted with congratulatory acceptance letters. To the dismay of both the applicants and Vassar College, generic letters, intended only for portal testing purposes, had been inadvertently left online for all to see when prospects logged in to check their admission status. Oops.

Similar damage was done at the U.K.’s prestigious Cambridge University, where several hundred applicants who received acceptance emails were later informed that they had, in fact, been rejected. Ouch. Most recently, at UCLA, students on the admissions waiting list received emails regarding their financial aid status. These emails inadvertently included language congratulating these wait list students for having been accepted for admission. What?

These are far from isolated incidents. Over the past few years, several more institutions have had to wipe egg from their prominent faces after admissions processing glitches produced similarly embarrassing results. When these kinds of frustration-inducing events occur, the public apologies typically include an explanation pointing to computers/technology as the culprit – somehow the computer-aided delivery mechanism (e.g., email) failed.

But look just below the surface, and the root cause tends to be human error or a failure of oversight in using the technology. At Cambridge, someone sent emails to the wrong distribution list. At Vassar, no one noticed the test version of the acceptance letter was still posted when the online portal went live for prospect access. Kudos to the representative from UCLA, who at least publicly acknowledged that human error was a factor in the conflicting messages sent to students.

Errors happen. And that’s unfortunate – both for the prospective students whose celebrations become short-lived and for the conscientious staffers who come to realize the impact of mistakes they unknowingly made. What can institutions do to minimize, if not eliminate, such gaffs from occurring?

A good start is to embrace automated, computer-aided capabilities that reduce the number of opportunities for human intervention to put accuracy at risk. In admissions review and decision-making, this means putting some controls in place regarding how decision letters are issued.

For instance, have the software (typically an ECM platform) driving and monitoring the flow of application files through the review and decision process also automatically update the student information system (SIS) with decision data. By allowing an automated system to perform the updates (as opposed to having staff manually enter this data), you’ll eliminate the possibility that decisions to admit or deny become erroneously associated with the wrong students.

Next, have the ECM platform trigger the SIS to create decision letters and emails, or have the ECM platform handle document creation natively. If performed by the ECM platform, document creation capabilities ensure the text of outbound letters and emails includes phrasing appropriate only for particular students, based on their admissions status.

As an additional safeguard, make sure you’re generating distribution lists based on filtered reports culled either from where the decision was made (the ECM platform) or from where the decision was recorded (the SIS). This guarantees the letters to be delivered are associated with applicants based on how they have already been identified and tagged in those systems in the appropriate decision categories – admit, deny, wait list, etc.

By taking these precautions made possible by automation, you’ll help to avoid student disappointment, bad press and guilt-wracked staff members who were only trying to do the right thing. But didn’t.

As Transfer Student Numbers Increase, So Must Your Speed in Enrolling Them

// March 28th, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

The evidence continues to mount. Transfer students – and their transfer transcripts – are going to keep arriving in droves at most institutions. As a recent study shows, one-third of all students transfer at least once, and a quarter of that group transfers more than once. Helping to drive up transfer volumes are the increasing numbers of upper middle class students who are choosing to start at community colleges. Another study reveals that enrollment in community colleges by students from families with annual incomes of $100,000 or more has risen from 16 percent to 22 percent in the past four years.

These trends echo what I’ve been commenting on over the past several months – most recently when I outlined the connections among transfer credit processing, enrollment goals and performance-based funding. As I suggested then and explained in detail in an earlier post on speed and responsiveness in transfer credit evaluation, transfer students are increasingly approaching their next-stage enrollment options the way they approach their options as consumers: they’re shopping.

As shoppers, they’re looking for the best deal – in this case, the school that will accept the largest amount of previously earned course credit. But, they’re also highly influenced by how quickly the offer arrives. While two schools might ultimately present equally generous credit acceptance packages, many transfer students will take the first offer to arrive, even if that school was not their first choice. Basic psychology applies here: It’s the reassuring presence of the “known” versus the anxiety-inducing wait for the “who knows?”

Similarly to the way drivers waiting in line at a toll booth grow frustrated as the cars in the lanes alongside them seem to be moving faster, quickly returning to “full speed” while they continue to wait, students eager for acceptance offers become increasingly impatient. And, like those drivers who start thinking about whether or not switching lanes would get them through the toll stop faster, transfer students are increasingly willing to pursue what they perceive to be the clearest path.

So, my advice is to keep the transfer acceptance lanes open and the traffic moving. In your Admissions or Registrar’s office, leverage automation to:

• Speed the transcript data grab by automatically pulling school, term, course and grade dataInstantly feed your student information system or degree audit system with transcript data and credit evaluation decisions
• Streamline course equivalency database lookups
• Simplify routing and approval of course exceptions (e.g., unfamiliar schools, new courses)

With overall transfer numbers on the rise and demographic shifts in the community college crowd, the old ways – manual data entry and paper-based review for equivalency matching – won’t be good enough to keep up. And if slowdowns continue to occur, you may pay a very heavy toll, indeed: the loss of significant numbers of prospective students.

Manual Labor and Capture: The Thorn in the Side of ECM

// March 12th, 2012 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Admissions, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Human Resources, Insurance, IT, Lending // Glenn Gibson

“Every rose has its thorn.” So croons Bret Michaels in the famous Poison song of the same name.

When it comes to relationships, he has a point. But is it also true of your enterprise content management (ECM) solution? If ECM is the beautiful rose, what is its thorn? 

Two simple – and expensive – words: manual labor.

Yes, after we settle in to enjoy the beautiful return on investment (ROI) of our ECM solution, we soon realize that the labor involved with manually typing document index values (names, addresses, account numbers and so forth) into our ECM system takes a lot of time and effort. It begins to feel, well, thorny. 

Even the study materials for the industry-recognized ECM certification CDIA+ tell us that manual labor associated with scanning and indexing can be the most expensive part of an ECM project.

Why?  Because manual data entry is slow, tedious and error-prone.

And those keyed-in errors can be very costly.

Costly errors in many locations

Much akin to someone misfiling a paper document, badly indexed electronic documents make your information difficult to find later on. This dramatically increases business process costs and can even lead to wrong decisions made due to incomplete information.

Now consider that your ECM system is only one of the places that this information is manually entered.  Duplicate data is often typed into several business systems, often by a variety of people across your organization.  Every time the same information is manually inputted, your risk of error increases.

And that just leads to added costs. Many organizations spend a ton of money on manual labor associated with indexing, but then turn around and spend more money on QA processes to make sure that the information is entered accurately.

So is there any way to extract this thorn from the side of ECM?  Yes, and it’s easy – stop doing manual data entry. It’s just painful.

Option 1:  Add ‘Advanced Capture’ technology to your ECM solution

People are not the only ones who can read and write, you know. Technological advancements allow computers to recognize relevant characters from a page, either typed or hand written, translate these into words, verify that they are correct, and fill in data fields for you.  What’s amazing is that this information can then be used to update ALL your other systems, simultaneously. 

Option 2: Outsource your scanning and indexing.

This option takes the manual labor associated with scanning and indexing off your hands altogether!  Instead of buying and maintaining scanners, and employing people to load them with paper and manually type in the index values, you can simply pay a fee for an organization with a Imaging Services department to do this for you.

Through this process, you send your documents to a central location where the scanning and indexing can be done for you, allowing you to instantly upload the documents and relevant data into your ECM and other relevant systems. 

This option can be a very cost effective approach for converting all those dusty boxes of documents into clean, easily accessible digital images.

So there you have it, there really is no reason to feel the pain of manual labor with your ECM system.  Depending on your business needs, you have two very good options to choose from.

In the end, it seems that Bret Michaels was actually wrong.  When penning those famous words in 1988, he had obviously never heard of the quite beautiful and thorn-less Lady Banks Rose. 

It’s likely that he hadn’t heard of Advanced Capture technologies out-sourced scanning providers either.

Don’t Make Students Wait: Augment Your SIS to Ensure Service Satisfaction

// March 1st, 2012 // No Comments » // Admissions, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

If the following scenario sounds familiar, you have my sympathy:  A call from an applicant comes into one of the Enrollment-side offices – Admissions, Registrar, Financial Aid. On the line is a prospective student wanting to know if you have received or processed a particular document - a letter of recommendation, perhaps, a transfer transcript or a verification document for aid purposes.  

No one in the office can confirm receipt – at least not quickly enough to answer the student’s question on the first call. A quick check into the student information system (SIS) shows no such document associated with the applicant record. Then, two days later, the SIS record does show receipt – after a staff member manually updated the document checklist once the document finally emerged from the mailroom. It’s three more days before someone notices the update and remembers to call the applicant back.

 To the student, the gap in time between her initial call and the response is intolerable. She decides to salve her frustration by narrowing her list of enrollment options. She won’t be calling this school again.

Decisions beget decisions

The school is behind the times. It needs to reduce, if not eliminate, the time between documents arriving in the office and updates appearing in the SIS – whether that’s PeopleSoft, Banner, Datatel or some other application. Maybe you do, too.

Why? Because your institution should do everything it can to help students make the right decisions. From an enrollment perspective, “right” decisions can be boiled down to these:

• Choosing to enroll in your institution (rather than at one of your competitors)
• Choosing to register only for appropriate and necessary course work (i.e., avoiding redundant or irrelevant courses)
• Choosing to return to your institution through degree completion (and in a timely fashion)

You can ensure that those decisions are made in your institution’s favor. How? By consistently displaying your own decisiveness in interactions with prospects and students. Act decisively, and you’ll leave little room for students’ doubt or hesitation.

 To do this, you will need to arm staff with accurate, up-to-date information – the kind that fully prepares them for fast, confident responses and actions. The holster is the SIS, and the silver bullets of decision-bolstering, trust-inspiring information will be there if you do the following:

Pull  document data automatically

Manual data entry kills speed and efficiency. If your enrollment offices continue to rely on it, they – and their SIS – will always be behind. Consider transfer transcripts. At many schools, transcripts constitute the highest volume of incoming documents to process, including updating the SIS record. It is common for staff to take an hour or more to manually input school, term, course and grade data from a single transcript into the SIS (or degree audit system). It is also common for stacks of transcripts to pile up before being processed or evaluated. Without tools for automating the data grab, there’s really no chance for a staff member to have thorough, timely information at hand in the SIS.

 Post data to the SIS automatically

 Not only do you want to pull data from documents automatically, you want to push data (document data, document metadata, electronic feeds, business process actions, and so forth) into SIS automatically. Again, it’s the avoidance of manual slowdowns. Simple, really.

Post data to the SIS in real-time

Until recently, periodic updates to SIS – hourly, twice daily, nightly – were often timely enough for many enrollment offices. But, as competition for students intensifies, so does the need for a competitive advantage. From a response preparedness standpoint, there’s no better way to be out in front than to always work from the most up-to-date information possible. For that, real-time is the holy grail of SIS updating.

Want to never make a student wait before confirming receipt of required documents? Update the SIS document checklist instantly. Want to know at any moment exactly how the applicant pool is shaping up? Instantly update SIS with decisions made in the admissions review process.

While you’re at it, make those real-time exchanges bidirectional. In one direction, have the enterprise content management (ECM) system update the SIS with newly arriving documents, data and decisions. In the other direction, have the SIS alert the ECM system with new information (e.g., updated student record fields also used for document indexing purposes).

With those real-time updating capabilities in place, you won’t need my sympathy. But, your competitors might.