Cost savings
Printing and stationery
If you place all your key content on your external website and use web content management software to ensure the content is up to date and secure and potential students and regulatory bodies and funders can access and download the content in digital format then you can save considerable amounts of money in printing, postage, copying, stationery and filing costs. You can also save furniture and consumable costs if you are replacing large numbers of cabinets and folders.
Many organisations are already using EDRM to automate the policy making process and in particular the way in which committee agendas, papers and minutes and procedures and regulations and policies are distributed to committee members and made available to staff and students as applicable.
Telephone costs
Providing staff in student administration and support services with access to all the information held about a student online in digital form via the student administration system and the EDRM can save significant telephone costs as queries can be answered immediately while the student is on the telephone and there is no need to pay for a return call because you cannot answer the question immediately as the paper file is not available.
Space savings
A detailed review of your record keeping requirements, the development of a retention schedule and a review of your existing records systems can result in very significant space savings and hence cost savings. Your audit may discover significant sets of duplicate paper files. The duplicates can be destroyed to free up space. You may find paper records kept for many years longer than they need to be. They can be destroyed to free up space. You will identify large collections of semi-current records that need to be kept for legal purposes but can be moved out of offices and to low cost off site storage. The EDRM solution can hold the metadata so staff can continue to search for and identify folders and then request that they be returned to them. If your education organisation does not currently operate a central semi-current records service then establishing one can provide significant savings. Many organisations have found that as a result of a similar exercise they have been able to sell off accommodation or avoid the need to build or lease new office accommodation.
If you have a paper-intensive process and install a digital system you will save space. If you avoid recruiting additional staff as a result of improving productivity you will save additional space. Whether an accountant allows you to claim space savings depends on whether you can re-use the space or prove that if space was not saved extra space would need to be built or a move to larger premises needed. In the latter cases space savings can be very significant. In the former case they are less so.
Improved cash flow
Another major area can be cash flow. Many organisations which currently have lost control of their supplier payment process can improve cash flow and save interest payments by drawing down only the money they know they will need to settle payments over a set period. At present with so many payments in the paper-based approval cycle and no workflow management (WFM) software feeding them back statistics, they have to draw down considerably more money in case they have to pay all outstanding commitments; hence, they lose the interest on that money. If new orders can be processed in 24 hours with e-procurement rather than the previous five or ten days, then cash flow can be significantly improved as well. Similarly if incoming paper invoices are scanned and digitised and digital images routed to budget holders for approval this can speed up the approval and payment cycle significantly.
Tactical benefits:
Productivity improvements
Competitive gain
Cost savings
Space savings
Improved cash flow
