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Seminole State College
dbs Document Management Suite Case Study

Campus-wide document management, e-forms, and e-signatures
Products used: dbs LiveForms™ PRO, Docubase Education Suite PRO, dbs eSign PRO
BACKGROUND

Seminole State College, established in 1931 as Seminole Junior College, is located in the east-central portion of the state in Seminole, Oklahoma, a designated All-American City with a population of approximately 7,500. The college offers Degree programs in Business and Education, Health Sciences, Language Arts and Humanities, STEM and Social Sciences. The college serves approximately 1,500 students, and makes it a priority to be current with the latest systems and solutions that help keep the institution efficient, keep its operating costs low, and be able to provide the highest levels of services to its students. This is why when the school found itself with an outdated document management system and expensive one-off apps supporting forms and signatures scattered around the campus, a decision was made to search for a document management expert partner to streamline the entire life cycle of documents including information capture in digital forms, full document and content management, and electronic signature workflow automation for faculty contracts.

WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES?

Document management in the school was a combination of manual processes, paper forms, and a legacy imaging system used mainly by the registrar’s office that was not fully functional and out of support. They had tried to implement an electronic signature portal with one of the mass market providers, but that was very expensive to be used at scale.

As a result, not only were their operating costs quickly getting out of hand, but they were also unable to provide their students with the high levels of student services they expected.

Based on these challenges, the main requirements for the desired document management solution were defined by the school as:

  • A modern document and content management system that was secure and flexible and could be used easily by all departments in the institution.
  • A centralized platform from which to design, deploy, and manage all the different types of electronic forms used across the institution.
  • An electronic signature solution that could automate the cumbersome process of managing the workflow and collecting digital signatures for faculty contracts.
Having all solutions under a single vendor who could help configure and support them according to the institution’s specific needs would be ideal.
SUMMARY OF THE SOLUTION

After evaluating the offering of the top document management vendors in the higher education space, the customer selected dbs Software and Services to provide them with its suite of document management solutions for higher education, consisting of Docubase Education Suite PRO, LiveForms™ PRO, and dbs eSign PRO.

The implementation began by replacing the legacy imaging solution with Docubase Education Suite PRO, hosted in the dbs Cloud, where departmental users could scan/capture, index, and securely store all types of student records. Time was of the essence due to the existing system being rendered unusable due to lack of support, so dbs quickly implemented the school’s new Docubase environment and migrated the existing documents in an extremely short period of time. The users found Docubase so intuitive and simple to use that they immediately began using it even before any formal training was completed.

Following the Docubase implementation, dbs LiveForms™ PRO was configured, and the school’s most heavily used forms were quickly designed and deployed in the new system. These included Change of Information, Backdate/Drop Class, Substitution/ Equivalency, and Request for Withdrawal forms. All these forms are heavily used by students, contain multi-step review workflows, and collect digital signatures from students and approvers in each step. Having been previously a manual paper process, implementing dbs LiveForms™ PRO proved to be a significant time and cost savings for the school as it effectively replaced the school’s use of costly DocuSign envelopes.

With Docubase and dbs LiveForms™ in production, the school moved forward with automating faculty contracting signature workflows using dbs eSign. The school’s faculty contracting process was a complex process requiring a significant amount of manual intervention to prepare the contracts for each recipient based on the course load being taught and individual pay rates, and then each contract had to be manually loaded into the mass market eSign tool to collect upwards of half a dozen approvals and signatures. This entire process was greatly simplified and automated with dbs eSign. The manual component was completely removed from the equation, now allowing the school to simply upload a raw data file to a secure inbox using SFTP, and dbs eSign processes the data, generates the contracts, executes the workflow and collects all the approvals and electronic signatures quickly and efficiently. The result has been a drastic improvement in process efficiency and a significant reduction in the costs of collecting electronic signatures from all the participants involved.

The last step in the implementation process is enabling the connection between the three solutions, Docubase, LiveForms, and eSign, via web API so that completed forms and signed contracts are automatically captured and properly indexed in Docubase so that they are permanently stored and easily accessible when they are needed in the future. Further, manual intervention and workload associated with the long-term management of completed documents and workflows will be reduced. Docubase will also be integrated with the J1 SIS via API through Jenzabar’s Unity platform.

ACHIEVED BENEFITS

With Docubase Education Suite PRO, dbs LiveForms™ PRO, and dbs eSign PRO, Seminole State College has greatly reduced its reliance on manual processes and paper forms across its campus. As a result, these solutions combined with the expertise and support provided by dbs experts have increased the school’s operational efficiency all while minimizing thereby their operating costs, allowing them to achieve a very fast ROI on their investment.

Key benefits achieved by implementing
Docubase Education Suite PRO:
  • Centralized document repository for all types of documents and files from departments across the institution.
  • Fast and reliable availability of student documents and information.
  • Highly secure storage of digital records from across campus.
  • “Single Source of Truth” for all student documents and records.

Key benefits achieved by implementing

dbs LiveForms™ PRO:

  • Eliminating paper forms and workflows by digitizing the most heavily used forms in the school.
  • Reduction in costs associated with digital signatures by moving signature-intensive forms from Docusign to dbs LiveForms™.
  • Improved document management by having digital form workflows.
Key benefits achieved by implementing

dbs eSign PRO:

  • End-to-end automation of faculty contracting cycles.
  • Generation of individual contracts, execution of approval workflows, and collection of compliant digital signatures, all from uploading a single raw data file.
  • Error-free execution of contracting workflows.
  • Single dashboard to see real-time status of approvals and signatures for each contract.

DEPLOYED SOLUTION FEATURE SET

  • Docubase Education Suite PRO.
  • dbs LiveForms™ PRO with drag-and-drop forms designer, workflow, and business rules engine.
  • dbs eSign PRO.
  • Forms design and solution support from the dbs expert team.

“Proper document management is a fundamental pillar of today’s
modern campus, and having the right partner is a must for success.
Selecting dbs for this project has proven to be a very wise decision.
Not only is their software top notch, but their expert team consistently goes above and beyond to ensure all of our needs and requirements are met”

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommend!

~ Marc Hunter, IT Director/CISO Seminole State College

dbs Software & Services (dbs) is a long-standing provider of document management and process automation solutions for education and business, and the exclusive provider of Tessi Docubase® in North America.

Tessi Docubase® is an enterprise-grade modular, secure, and easy-to-use document management system that seamlessly integrates with Business Information Systems. Its secure architecture and a broad range of features make it the perfect solution for a wide range of enterprises and use cases.

dbs LiveForms, is a low-code Business Process Automation platform. Its sole focus is simplifying complex processes by automating repetitive steps – from data capture to alerts, notifications, email confirmations, and everything in between quickly, without involving a programmer.

dbs eSign is a cloud-based electronic signature solution that allows users to manage the signing process for a document, from upload to signing and sealing, from any mobile device or computer.

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