Victoria’s Gordon Institute of TAFE has taken steps to tackle the workflow and records management challenges of student enrolment through the implementation of an EzeScan scanning solution.

Gordon Institute of TAFE, situated in Geelong, is the largest regional TAFE in Victoria. More than 26,000 enrolments are serviced annually, with 16,000 students studying on-campus, off-campus and in business or industry. Students enrolling at The Gordon complete manual forms which are submitted to one of the many Student Services Departments located around the campus.

Jan Askhoj, Records Manager at Gordon Institute of TAFE, explains ‘The forms that students complete and submit need to be kept for a seven year period; TRIM was implemented in 2009 to manage the institutes records but the process of registering students in the Student Management System and keeping files locally, to ultimately registering their enrolment forms in TRIM was a very manual labour-intensive process.’

Another challenge was access to the Student Enrolment Forms.

‘Requests are submitted for the student’s file and then it has to be located, this can be difficult especially when files are collected and processed at several locations then transited to the central records office,’ said Askhoj.

Upon identifying the challenges faced by the Student Services Officers, Askhoj began looking into methods of making these processes more efficient and less labour intensive. He required a scanning solution that would allow the Student Enrolment Forms from each individual Student Services Office to be scanned into TRIM, delivering improved workflows and easier access
to the documents

‘EzeScan was the most impressive and recommended scanning solution plus FYB who implemented TRIM for us also had experience with EzeScan installations,’ said
Askhoj.

FYB installed and configured the EzeScan software at The Gordon so that on enrolment the Student ID Numbers are exported from the Student Management System and a unique barcode is generated using a DYMO LabelWriter.

The label is affixed to the student’s enrolment documents and is scanned to a shared network folder. From this location EzeScan collects the scanned documents and begins to apply enhancements such as; OCR (i.e. pdf searchable), deleting blank pages and barcode recognition (BCR).

EzeScan then searches TRIM for the Student ID Number to see if a Student Folder already exists, if found the enrolments documents are saved to the Student Folder. If not found the Student Folder is automatically created based on the Student ID Number and then the
enrolment documents.

“The EzeScan solution will increase productivity by significantly reducing the time spent on handling paper forms during the enrolment processes at The Gordon,’ concludes Askhoj .