college administrators working at laptops

Higher Education Workflow Solutions to Automate Manual Administration Tasks

Optimize processes for smart university administration operations.

infovisual university workflow solutions

Of education managers surveyed, 55% regularly spend at least a full day of their work week on manual tasks, and 25% spend two days or more on these tasks.¹

It's not the work administration is doing that causes inefficiencies, it's how they do the work. Manual processes bog down departments and slow workflows — ultimately leading to poor student experiences. And when unstructured data is located in decentralized repositories across various departments throughout your institution, administration is forced to create data redundancies that increase the risk of submitting inaccurate data during compliance regulation procedures. With Ricoh's University Workflow Solutions, you can increase productivity, enhance the student experience and improve the integrity of your information by digitizing and centralizing content, automating processes, and using smart data to gain the insights you need.

Increase productivity by streamlining information

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Give a serious boost to data speed and intelligence to help optimize processes.

It's a struggle to keep up in today's fast-changing world if processes move slowly or even just moderately fast. By digitizing paper documents and centralizing content, you can help faculty and staff share more reliable information much faster. Centralized digital data can also:

Empower administration with instant visibility into outstanding student information needed by the registrar.
Help your accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) departments reduce costs with fewer labor-intensive processes.
Enable human resources to easily share employee documents with other departments.

We've helped a number of educational organizations optimize processes and reduce paper consumption by digitizing files, student records and other information — leading to more efficient and cost-effective data workflows.

Content digitization and centralization can also help you improve the student experience in many ways — such as integrating departmental processes to help during the application process by giving students the ability to log into your content repository to make sure their scholarships are in place.

Once we've helped you digitize your information and made it available in a central repository, we can help you work even smarter by making your sensitive data easier to measure and manage, so when it comes time to prepare information for HIPAA, FERPA, PCI and other regulatory agencies, you can move quickly, with confidence in the accuracy of your data.

Reduce costs with process automation

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Free employees to focus on strategic learning initiatives by reducing manual tasks.

Digitizing and centralizing information are good ways to optimize processes, increase productivity and improve communication by bringing disparate systems together. You can further improve administration's ability to work smarter and faster with process automation.

Once you digitize most of your paper information and upload it to a central repository, a world of process automation opportunities become available that can help faculty, staff and students to keep work moving. For example:

Automatic emails can remind AP/AR staff of payments coming due.
Financial Aid can generate automated notifications to let students know what's missing in the application process.
Alumni Relations can automate marketing processes to help increase university funding while freeing their staff to focus on other important initiatives.

Scanning, keying and other manual tasks take a lot of time and can increase labor costs. However, automating these processes can lead to substantial benefits. We helped Tillamook Bay Community College (TBCC) satisfy about 80 percent of business process automation for multiple departments throughout their organization. Their payroll department alone saves about 65 weeks of manpower time each year as a result.

In addition to automation, mobile capture can help you to improve the student experience by saving students time. Ricoh's mobile capture technology uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read document data, and it can automatically pull this information into your content management system. This helps to speed up the admissions process for students, allowing them to perform tasks easily with their own smart devices — such as getting important information to financial aid by taking pictures of personal documents and uploading them to your site.

Get the insights you need with smart data

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Enhance the student experience and optimize processes with a digital transformation.

By empowering employees with smart data, they can get the insights they need to help your organization grow. Our consulting team can help by:

Assessing your current situation to see where you are along your digital transformation journey.
Helping to find and fill gaps on how information is shared between departments.
Developing analytics dashboards tailored to provide the insights you need to meet changing student expectations.

We can work with you to make sure process changes run smoothly — helping faculty, staff and students to ease into new ways of moving information. We can also team up with your IT staff to seamlessly integrate new digital solutions with your current infrastructure while enhancing data security both across your network and in the cloud.

No university's needs are the same, which is why we take the time to understand your current situation and future objectives. While working with Clemson University, our Managed Services team discovered a need to transform their print and mail services. By making this change, we helped to improve the student experience by reducing package retrieval wait times from 40-plus minutes to just over one minute, generate $2.5 million in new revenue and increase overall print and mail efficiency.

No matter where you are in your digital transformation journey, we can help move you forward so you can continue to increase productivity, meet student expectations and grow a healthier and stronger academic institution.

See more on our solutions

Case study: Capilano University

Learn how Ricoh helped the Capilano University registrar's office save time and money with a feature-rich document management solution tailored to their needs.

Read the case study

Modernize your registrar's office to support student success

Learn three ways to modernize your registrar's office — including using digital forms and automated processes — to help improve student outcomes.

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Case study: Algonquin College

Discover how Ricoh's Laserfiche document management solution helped the Algonquin College registrar's office increase productivity and reduce paper consumption.

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*“The State of Education Workflow Automation in 2018." Formstack. 2018. https://www.formstack.com/report/view/education-workflow-automation-2018