Tafe

College, University, Paperless document solution

Less searching, more teaching with our easy to use document management system designed for Tafe

A Tafe is such a complex business. Unlike an industry specific business like manufacturing, a Tafe is a great many businesses rolled into one.

You must manage students, faculty members through to general administration, catering events, working with suppliers, etc.

There are so many areas and each has its own document management challenges from basic records keeping; document version control; retention policies; document collaboration and the big one – workflow management of all this information as it passes from one business unit to the next.

Almost makes you want to retire early. What if this could be simplified so you can get back to the important business of teaching? M-Files could be your answer.

A simple to use, cloud or locally hosted, electronic document management system that captures all information, paper or electronic in origin, in a quicker and easier manner than you do today.

From there then being able to find anything you want and by anyway that makes sense to you.

What if you could google the Tafes knowledge base? If you wanted to know what time the sunsets tonight you would perform a google search where you would type in sunset time and your location. There is no need for you to know that the answer received was from a spreadsheet, 20 folders deep on a server in Adelaide, you just google the question and get your answer.

M-Files works the same way, just ask in plain English what it is you want and the answer is instantly displayed. Search ‘Telstra invoice’ and they are all displayed in date order. Search Mr Smith leave and see his leave application form. Search for a students name and see which courses they are enrolled in.

This all boils down to no more telephone tag, a great time saver.

Where is that student’s folder?

Something that you won’t hear again as everything you need is available instantly. The whole system has extensive security setting so only the authorised person can see what they are authorised to see.

Editable rights are also set so some users get to annotate, edit, delete and others get read-only rights. M-Files also integrates with your college management software so you only have 1 database to maintain.

Why is it not where it should be?

Another challenge we often see is misfiled information. Where I think it should be stored and how it should be named is often different to your approach. We are both right but it becomes difficult to share information and often we give up and have to create the document again, a terrible waste of resources.

With M-Files the rules are set and managed within the software. This means all information and knowledge is captured in a universal way.

One system, one method and a great result every time.

Click on one of the buttons below to get a free trial or an instant quote. As an industry support organisation you will be impressed with the small outlay and ease of use.

To read the full transcript of the video, please click here

Education video transcript

Overview

Hello and welcome to this demonstration of M-Files for Education. From pre-school, all the way through the university, we have deployed M-Files for many education institutes. To give you an overview of where we’re headed today, what this is all about, is a way to centralize all the school’s information. Whether that’s your paper-based files, electronic documents, your emails, invoices, reports, anything coming in or going out, it is all captured into a central system, quickly and easily. In fact, quicker and easier than your current manual processes. We’re not adding a job to the day but, most importantly, it’s all about retrieval, so allowing you and the staff to find anything instantly by anyway that makes sense to you. Who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, via a student number, I supply a name, an invoice, and we have it up on the screen immediately. It’s primarily designed as a productivity tool. We typically increase productivity by around an hour, per person, per day across education. The third and last part of the process is where this really all comes together. We’ll look at things like Assignments, Workflows, automatic processes that we’re doing and how we’re using this information on a day to day basis. You’ll get a good feel for what it’s all about. I’m sure you’ll see significant benefits.

About Us

A little bit about M-Files and who we are. We’ve been specializing in this for over 20 years. We can sell and supply any system in the marketplace, but we come back to M-Files time and time again. We’ve found it to have the greatest feature set. It’s the easiest to use and deploy, but it’s also the cheapest price point. It really has ticked all the boxes.

Security

Here are some of the current main points that we often find across education. I’m sure many of these, if not all of them, resonate with you. These are some of the problems, as well as many more, that we solve by using M-Files. Let’s have a look at how it all works. The whole system is password-protected, so we’ve got a login. This means we can set up different security levels for different people within the organization. There may be a general filing area that everyone can see, there might be a HR/Payroll that only two or three people can access. Different security levels, depending on what’s required. From there, we can set up individual user rights, where some people get to annotate, edit, append, delete. Other people get read-only rights and behind the scenes, every action that is taken within the system, is automatically tracked and recorded. You’ll know who’s looked at what document when, who’s approved a quote, who’s updated a version. Any of those actionable items are now automatically tracked and recorded.

Familiarity

The nice thing about M-Files is, it looks and feels like Windows Explorer. There is really no learning curve. Where you’ve got server drives and folders, all the way under Supplier documents, and our Supplier, Bloggs Breezy Air, if you click on the Bloggs folder we get a list of documents. Like Windows Explorer, if you click on a document, you get a preview of that on the right-hand side. The nice thing about this, being based on a folder structure, it’s instantly usable. We’re all familiar with it. Of course, the problem with folder-based systems is, they don’t work. If you name it incorrectly, put it in the wrong spot, or if you and I have differing opinions on how we think it should be named, or saved, it can be difficult to

find and retrieve. We take a vastly different approach. Instead of having to name this document correctly, and put it in the right spot, what if we had dozens of different links, that linked back to it. You could search for it by who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, via a keyword off a document and we have it up on the screen immediately. We call those links metadata. Metadata for this document is listed at the bottom, where we’ve noted who the Supplier, is what campus it’s for, document types, dates, purchase order numbers, Assignments, Workflows etc. Because, we tend to file and find using metadata, the old folder-based search method generally becomes redundant. This example of metadata, is just that, an example. We will custom build this, specifically for you, based around your school, using your departments, that you already have established. We will create each of your document types and naming conventions. We’ll use this as a generic example for today’s demo.

Capturing

Let’s look at ways of capturing information to make sure the input process is quick and easy. Let’s say you’ve got some correspondence to one of your Suppliers. This might be on letterhead. It might be a word document. It could be a spreadsheet, a PDF, a photo or video, any file format whatsoever can be saved. How do we save it? The same way you do, but instead of saving it in your folders on your server we now save it in M-Files, which also lives on your server. M-Files then asks us to categorize this. Would you put this under Accounts, Administration, Finance, HR, Planning & Development, Student Files. You’ve got various groups and departments already established. We will custom build this for you. Inside each department, you have document types. You have Accounts Payable, Room Hire, School Fees etc. Not only will we create the document types for you, we will also then create all those naming conventions, based around what you currently do. M-Files then asks us to fill out the bulk of the filing fields, which of course we do. All of this can be linked into your existing databases that you have. If you’re using PET or equivalent or one of the other systems that are there, instead of having to type in all your students, your Suppliers, your contacts, we can link back to them. We hit create and that one is added to the system. You continue to work on the document as you normally do. Now that we’re finished with it, it is saved into the M-Files system and we’ve captured our first document.

Templates

Our letter to Bill Bloggs. The preview of it is shown on the right and all that metadata is listed at the bottom. Let’s do this again but a far quicker and easier way. Because M-Files runs all day, you can build new documents from within the system. Instead of building a document from scratch, one of our clients has requested a purchase order. Instead of having to create each document wouldn’t it be nice if we could use your existing templates. If we had a Bill of the world that works here and requested the purchase order, it could then be changed. Having templates managed in here is a great way to keep them up to date. This can be used for Workplace Health and Safety, Leave Applications, Excursions, anything that you use common templates for, can all be managed here. M-Files fills out the bulk of the filing fields for me. All we have to do is fill out the basic rest of the information, and today’s date. It will even set up an automatic naming convention which I’ll come back to shortly. We then need to create this purchase order. We create, and our template is launched. We’ve got your letterhead on top and your standard template. I’ve asked M-Files to fill out the bulk of these filing fields for me. A lot of this information has come from all these items in dark-grey. All come from M-Files, but a lot of this information in M-Files has come from your existing data bases. If you wanted to put in additional metadata, like perhaps the documents version number, using the M-Files tab which follows you around through the office suite, we can insert additional metadata. In this case, our document version number. That’s another item in dark grey. Later, I’m going to change this version and you’ll see that I’ll go from version one to version two. We’re finished with this one. We save this into the system and we’ve captured our second document, our purchase order. The preview on the right, and all that metadata is listed at the bottom.

Capture Emails Quickly

Let’s have a look at emails in Outlook. Emails are notoriously difficult to capture and file. Some of the problems with emails. First, they are an editable type document, they’ve got attachments, they’re sent to you as an individual, I’ve no idea whether you’ve dealt with it or not and then six months later you run out of space and you delete them. Company information is just disappearing which is a disaster. Luckily M-Files and Outlook integrates into the filing system. To file something all we simply do is drag and drop it. I see is an IT agreement from our IT Supplier. To me that sounds like admin correspondence. I drag and drop that into this smart folder and M-Files fills out all the filing fields for me. All I do is pop in that it’s for IT, I hit create and that one is added to the filing system. You’ve automatically complied with the Electronics Acts and it’s all backed up on the server. A couple of nice things, when you file something in M-Files, it’s given a blue category, so visually I can see that one out of four emails have been captured. If I was to email this through to you and to Michele in admin who’s responsible for filing it, and of course we have no idea, you both might file it, none of you may file it. Let’s say you filed it. When Michele goes to file it, it says it’s already been done. It saves on email duplication. How much time and space are wasted capturing duplicate emails? The file format that we saved this in, is an Outlook email, so when you open it, you can reply, forward, open attachments. We have it as a useful email, instead of as a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. I’m going to file another email but do this one a different way. This one also has an attachment in it and often when people send you attachments, it’s not so much the email you’re after, it’s more the attachments. The email is just the delivery method. I’m going to put this one under finance correspondence. It fills out the filing fields and makes it available for us instantly. As well, when we go into the M-File System we simply have our emails that we can open and use. They’re available to us as they previously were which is great.

Scanning

If it’s a piece of paper, we can run it through a high-speed scanner. We use document fed scanners like this one, where you load up a stack of pages. It will scan them through single sided, or double sided, 70 pages per minute, straight up onto the screen. We can make use of your existing photo copiers as scanning devices, or other scanners. They all pretty much do the same job. If you’ve got somebody who’s opening the mail, having a unit like this on their desk, is very ergonomic and a great time-saver. There are many ways of scanning into the system. One way is to right-click and add document from scanner. I’m not going to do that but if I did I would scan in a batch of mail and it would ask me who’s it from, what’s it about, where would you like to file it. Instead of doing batch scanning, let’s do batch importing.

Importing

What do you do with all the existing folders and subfolders that are already on the server. They can be brought into the system very quickly and easily. I’ve put together some example documents that we’re going to file all as a batch. We put this under our filing area as we had previously, and M-Files fills out the bulk of the filing fields for me. All we then do, is pop in today’s date. The name of your document in your folder, the credit application for Bloggs, is maintained. Of course, we have a preview of what we’re filing on the side. When I hit create on the first one, you see the first ones added to the system and the next ones opened. Its preview is shown on the right and its naming convention is also maintained. Of course, the whole point of your folders is, their groups of documents. We know that this is the correspondence folder for our Supplier. Why don’t we say create? When we do that, each of the documents are added to the system. The original filing format is maintained. Your original naming convention and document dates are maintained. Now, you can also search for a variety of the keywords off the document, as well as via any of the metadata. It takes around 10 seconds to capture a folder. If you look at how many folders and subfolders you have, you’ll be able to very quickly capture all that information.

Linking Existing Folders

What if we simply linked back to your existing network drives. What if you had a Z drive on the server. We can map back to your Z drive. We call this a traditional folder, and there is your Z Drive with all your folders and documents that are sitting there, as they look and feel today. That entire folder structure that you have, can be made available from day one. That’s the first part of the system which is capture. We should save you around 20% of the time that you do to capture now.

Retrieval

We find this is a faster and easier way, but the real benefits start to come in the second part of the system, which is instant retrieval. If you wanted to know what time the sunset was tonight in your location, you’d put the word sunset into Google and you get yourself an instant answer. You don’t need to know that that information came from a spreadsheet 20 folders deep on a server in Darwin. You don’t really care, you just ask a question and you want yourself at instant answer. M-Files works in a very similar way. It allows you to find things based on what it is you want. You don’t have to remember how it was named or saved. Now very vaguely, I remember we spoke to someone called Bloggs. That’s all I know. I do a search for that and I get documents totalling 20. It shows me where that word appears in the name. It shows it where it appears multiple times in the metadata and it shows me where it appears within the document. This is nice, but we got too many. It’s just too many. I remembered it had something to do with Bloggs and was an invoice. It narrows it down to five. It shows me where both words appear in the name, multiple times throughout the metadata and throughout our document. 99 times out of 100 you know who you’re talking to. You know what you’re looking for and you drill it down to one or two documents every time. We’ll answer the telephone and take any inquiry. You can say, yes, looking at it, what would you like?

Customised Shortcuts for Searching

Today, obviously we’re looking at all this from a Supplier point of view. As you’d imagine, if you were looking for student records or leave applications or any of the Governance side of things, it would allow you to find it instantly. Part of the complexity of what we found within schools, is that you’re running so many business units there. You’ve tried to squeeze all staff into one and it tends not to work. Everybody goes off and creates their own filing systems, which as we know, causes a mess. What we do with M-Files, is we create M-Files around each of you as an individual. I’ve set up some common searches on the side an example across the whole school. These will all be created for each of you, so it’s as if the entire filing system revolves around you and the role that you do. You may say, show me all our Supplier documents. If we go into our Supplier Bloggs, we have all their documents and folders. You may want to look at it from a student point of view. You say, show me all our students. We’ve got a student here. We’ve got which year they’re in, Medicare numbers, fees paid, all sorts of additional information are here. Perhaps you’d like to look at it from a Supplier point of view. If we click on our Supplier Bloggs Breezy Air, we can see what air-conditioning they’ve worked on the secondary campus. They’ve got addresses, phone numbers, contact information. This is all customer relationship management information which no doubt, is available in other databases. Wouldn’t it be nice if it all appeared in your document management system as well? That it linked from those areas. Perhaps you’d like to look at it from a HR point of view. If we look at our employee Angela, we can see she has an employee contract, leave applications and a performance appraisal. If we go into her performance appraisal it’s automatically named on what it is, who it’s for, where it was. We get a preview of course, of that performance appraisal on the right-hand side. Perhaps you’d like to look at it from an Asset Register point of view. I can see on this computer, who we bought it from, how much it was, serial numbers, whose desk it’s on and even things like warranty expiration dates can be listed there as well. Maybe, even from an accounts point of view, you might want to look at all Finance or Tax documents as an example. We’ve got our donations list. However you’d like this information displayed to you, it’s there. What we find that we use all the time is recently accessed by me. I’m always going back to things that I’ve recently worked on and one of those things we worked on was our purchase order. What we’re trying to show you is that you can find whatever it is you want, every single time. It is just a matter of asking the question and it’s made available to you instantly.

Processing Documents

Annotations

Now that we’ve got some information, we often want to work on it. What I’m going to do is, if I sent this to two of you to work on, this purchase order and ask you to make some changes, you’d make changes, email it back to me and I’ve somehow got to collate it. What if you could simply just do all this on the fly? What if you could highlight sections? Suggest we scrub out parts? You can draw arrows on it. Maybe even a post-it note that doesn’t fall off. We’re annotating over the top of the document, not on the original. You can print this with or without these notes. I can have customized rubber stamps, saying this one’s approved for payment and I can even assign it. I can sign off on processes as we go. We’re annotating over the top of the document not on the original.

Version Control

If you wanted to change the original, we have a simple checkout process. While this is checked out to me, only I can change it. Everybody else can view it but only I can make changes. I’ve decided to change the colour. I’m finished with my changes, so I saved this back into the system. Now, everybody else can use it again, if they wish. We click on our purchase order and we can see that it’s red and I think, well that’s interesting, how did that come about? I can now look for the documents history and I can see a series of versions. I can see how we’ve gone from our purchase orders through to where we are. Made by different people, at different times. What I’d like to do is click on our current version, just to see where we are up to. I open that one up in word, but M-Files have said, wouldn’t it be nice if you could see the history of this document. I would like to compare this version versus the previous version. It opens them up. One is on top, one is on the bottom. You can see the differences between our documents. I think this change is awful. I want to go back to version one. I close that down. I click on the version that I liked, which was the earlier version. I asked, can I roll back to this version and it says yes and it creates version 11. One minute later and back to grey. Instant and easy version control, that cannot be circumvented by Staff.

Distributing Documents

Now that you’ve worked on a document you often want to send it to somebody. A common feature in any program is to right click and send as a copy by email. It attaches it as it is a Word document to your email and you can hit Send. What if you don’t want to send this out as an editable Word document? In your world you open it in Word, save it as a PDF on the desktop, you attach it, send it, delete it from the desktop. That’s way too hard. With M-Files, we give the ability to right-click and send as a PDF by email. It opens, it converts it as a PDF, attaches it to your email and you’re ready to hit Send. You’ll see niceties like that throughout the whole M-Files experience. Just quick, simple day-to-day things, that we’re all doing, done in an easier way. When you send out this purchase order to your Supplier, that’s another business transaction. Shouldn’t you be filing this? We give you the ability to do that with one-click, with our unique send and save – M-Files button. It’ll do both at the same time.

The Power of Metadata

That’s the first two parts of the system filing and finding of documents using metadata. That within itself should be a brilliant productivity result. Having what you need available to you every single time. Schools are under so much pressure and often understaffed. If we could find things in seconds, instead of minutes, it will give you an extra hour a day. It’ll make a tremendous business decision and process refinement for the whole school. It’s in the third and last part of the system where this really all comes together. What if we could apply this theory of metadata to other things within the school? What if you could have metadata around Parents, Contacts, Suppliers, Students, Staff Members? You will then start to see, that all of your information, like Word documents, Reports, PDFs, emails and all of your knowledge, like student numbers, addresses, phone numbers, contact details, email addresses, can all be brought together into one place. A one-stop shop for all the information and knowledge. The best way to start to show you the third and last part of the process is first, we’re going to do a search by all staff. We do a search for all employees. There’s 13 of us. If you click on me as an example, it has metadata around me as an employee. I’m not a document, but I’m still in the database. I have metadata. It says the department I’m in, the position. I’ve got addresses, phone numbers, contact details, emergency contact information etc. You’ll see through M-Files, as these little arrows show, everything is related back to everything else. What is related to me? I’m working with ten of our contacts. I’ve got five employees in my team. Four outstanding Assignments today. Let’s go down further. One of the people that I’ve been working with is Bloggs Breezy Air. When I click on their card, I get all their contact information, their addresses, phone numbers, who’s that managed by in our office, who’s got purchasing approval etc. What’s linked to our Supplier Bloggs well, as it turns out, are some documents. One of those documents is that purchase order. When we click on our document again, we get our document’s metadata and our document’s preview. What is linked to the document, as it turns out, is an annotation, an Asset Register, a Supplier. If we were to go into this air-conditioning unit, isn’t there documents associated with the purchase of it and again, we’re back to our purchase order. Wherever you are within the M-Files system, whether you’re within a document, an Employee, a Parent, a Supplier, a Student, everything is related back to everything else.

Assignments, Task, Approvals

Now, all your information and all your knowledge has been brought together. Where that becomes particularly useful, is in a simple day-to-day example. If I asked you to call Bloggs regarding that purchase order, how do I get your attention? Do I send you a long email you don’t understand? Do I come and interrupt you? We’re getting constant interruptions. Even if I get your attention, how do I know you’ve done your job? Do I have to follow up tomorrow? This takes up your time and my time. Instead of having unmanaged plastic in trays, what if we could replace them with managed electronic in trays? Simple jobs are now called Assignments. My assignment for you, is to call Bloggs, simple stuff. I’m going to give you a bit more information. I’m going to allocate it to the Clients for the Supplier’s file. I’ve got a permanent record that I’ve requested this of you. The deadline I’m giving you though, is today, so it’s a short deadline to get this one completed. As I’m set up in the system I will assign it to myself. I’ll receive email notification. We have our new assignment. Let’s say, somehow, I’ve notified you to do this work, how do you go about doing it. First, where’s the phone number for Bloggs? Is that in your database? Is there a contacts database in Outlook? Is it on a business card? Once you’ve got the contact details, where’s the document itself? Is that the one that you emailed to them? Is that the one they edited and sent back to Michelle in your office? How do you know you’re on the right version? You can pick up the phone information with M-Files. If I asked you to give Bloggs a call, you say great, what’s their phone number and there it is at the bottom. As the phone’s ringing, Bill picks up the phone and you say hey Bill I’ve got this purchase order open on my desk, what would you like to know? What a result. How many times a day do we need a document and a phone number, an email and its attachment, an invoice and its approval status, a student, sick leave and whether it’s been approved or not? Most of what we’re dealing in today is information and knowledge. This brings the two together beautifully.

Notifications

How did we notify you of this? We have found the best place to do that, is with in Outlook. We send and receive emails all day every day. We get email notification telling us to do our job and it says, cool Bloggs sent through the purchase order. That’s fine, deadline is today, I better get on with it now. Instead of going off in all those different areas, you can click on it directly from your notification. It takes you straight to your assignment in M-Files. Not only do we have all the contact details made instantly available to us, so we can call them or email them. Not only do you have the document open on the right-hand side, so you’ve got those specifics. You’ve also got the rest of their file open as well in case they ask you something obscure. This will be in your in tray, your to do lists forever, until you mark it as completed. To do so, you simply pop a tick next to your name. You hit save and that one is added and completed.

Managing Workloads

As your boss, I might say show me all Assignments for yourself and there is a list of five. I see some are completed some are outstanding and I can see where you’re up to. If I see that you’ve got too much work to do, or too little work, I can micromanage in trays to ensure that nothing gets missed. This is simple day-to-day tasks which is great.

Workflows

A lot of what we’re doing of course, is more complicated, in that we’re dealing with multiple steps and stages, often multiple people involved and different timeframes or deadlines that need to be adhered to as well. One of the last things are going to show you is a workflow that brings all these different features together. We’re going to create a new document but instead of building a document from scratch, under accounts, one of our people that we work with, wants a quote for room hire. That launches our quoting template. We fill out our usual metadata fields as we did previously and when I hit create our quoting template is launched. We’ve got your letterhead on top and we’ve asked it to fill out the bulk of the filing fields for me. All we have to do is say that the room hire is $300 and as quick and as easy as that, you’ve finished with your quote. Like any other document, we have our preview on the right-hand side. We have our metadata at the bottom. We’ve set up automatic naming, so it’s named by what it is, who it was for and when it was. Now we also have this workflow area. This workflow is a room hire quote processing workflow. There’ll be dozens of different Workflows built and created for you. We will teach you how to maintain and manage them. This one has been automatically assigned to me and I’ve received email notification. The deadlines are in 24 hours and my job is to please review the quote. I’m looking at it, do I approve this yes or no? At this stage I can go in two different directions, I can either say, quote to be amended please see comments and it automatically goes back to your desk and you get email notification, or I can move it on. I’m going to move it on, I’m happy with it. I can say that this is approved and when you click OK, you see who it’s assigned to, whose desk it’s on. It goes off my desk and it goes to Karen’s desk. Karen gets notified via email. Her job is the quote has been approved please book the room. Karen does her part saying room booked quote finalized. She might say booked on today. When Karen clicks ok, it goes out of her to-do list. It’s now on nobody’s desk as it has now been completed. This is a very simple and short workflow, but it gives you the idea, that information can go through from person to person. Each one of you does a certain job or action. It then goes to the next person. 24 hours before my deadline, I can be sent a reminder. 24 hours after I miss my deadline, you get notified. You can put all sorts of rules around these Workflows. They can be very simple as demonstrated. They can be more complicated, depending on whatever it is you need. We will help you build, develop and maintain them. Once they’re up and running, there’s usually very little refinement. They just work like that for years with minor refinement. If you do need to refine it, we have these nice graphical overviews. You can take that to a staff meeting saying, hey guys, is this process working now?

Mobile/Web Access

The last thing I wanted to show you is being able to access the entire solution from any mobile device. We’ve become a more and more mobile workforce. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have access to the entire office available to you, from wherever you are, from any Android device, iPhone, iPad, my web browser? From wherever you are, you can have full access to the school. I can’t show you my mobile phone, but I can play for your one minute video which I’ll do now.

M-Files mobile access puts the information important to your business right at your fingertips no matter where you are. View documents on the go, like that purchase invoice that just came in. Check it out, make sure everything is correct and approve it. Then Greg in accounting gets emailed automatically. You can pull the invoice up on his laptop and send the payment. It’s seamless, mobile and available for download now and it’s just one of the ways you can experience the magic of M-Files.

Customisation/Implementation/Training

As you can see from that, it brings it all together. All your information, all your knowledge, available to you from wherever you are. You should see significant productivity gains and enhancements for the school. The important thing we found, with all this though, is implementation. It almost doesn’t matter which piece of software we’re buying, the most important part is implementation and training, to ensure that you get these results effortlessly from day one. Almost always when these projects are deployed, there tends to be a hiccup and all sorts of problems and it’s a mess. We have prided ourselves on that not being the case. We have 20 years of experience of implementing the solution. What we found is, you’ve got multiple staff, with multiple opinions. We need to align it. We need one filing system, one method. The first thing we’re going to do for you is develop a procedure and how to do manual, specifically for your school. We document what it is you do. This is just an example. How do you process the mail? What do you do with emails, invoices, reports? Whatever it is you do, we will custom build this for you. If you click on how we process the mail, there’s your workflow. It’s a made-up example, but if it was incoming and they are general documents, then they are to be opened and sorted at admin. Sort, scan and file. I’ve forgotten how to file, so I click on the word in blue and up come the filing instructions. Written instructions in English, from our trainers, not IT talk. This is not a technical manual. These screenshots are a copy of your M-Files system, so if someone starts new, they read that this is how we operate. We then take it further. We make fields compulsory, where you must file by who it’s from, what it’s about, when it came in, or the system won’t let you file it. You get to set as many or as few rules around the database to ensure it’s captured a certain number of ways. We will then provide extensive implementation and training. We’ll train two people there as M file system administrators. You’ll build and develop the whole system. You’ll set up procedures, processes, passwords. You’ll own it as a process in-house. The ongoing maintenance of the system is maybe five minutes a month. Once it’s up and running, you simply make use of it. We will then train the balance of the staff. It’s almost always, we start with the admin staff as they are handling the bulk of the information. We’ll train them in small classes of up to three people for four hours. We’re training you, processing your documents, through your scanners, based on your procedures and process manual, into your computers. You’ll be at an expert level. We’ll have everybody trained in back-to-back training sessions. You go live immediately, and you’re guaranteed to get your results.

Download a Trial/Quote

That’s probably enough out of me. As an overview I’m sure you can see some significant productivity gains and enhancements for what you do. We like to show people a full document management solution and its capabilities. You may find your requirements aren’t as extensive or are there certain features or functionality that you don’t require? In which case, we can certainly cut down the system to meet just what you need. There is an instant trial available you can download today. That’s available from our home page. It’s just a matter of filling out the details and you can instantly have M-Files available to you on your PC to trial. Of course, there’s an instant quote button, so if you’d like to get an indication of costings there are details for that as well. If you have any questions, certainly give me a call or drop me a line. That would be great, and we look forward to working with you on this project.

Our Document Management System is trusted by our clients

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Testimonial by  from
Sean Sandford Mortons - Urban Solutions

During our recent QA Certification and Accreditation process it became very clear that the power of M-Files could provide us with the ability to ensure that all documentation both leaving from and arriving into the office could be controlled in such a way to enable the document retrieval for Quality auditing extremely streamlined and efficient.

Furthermore the control of our QA Documents through M-Files has enabled us to manage and control system documentation in a way that provides users with the necessary access while tracking changes and being able to easily input the relevant details into the appropriate forms, checklists and reports. M-Files has enabled us to better control the system documents needed for audit control, monitoring and storage, improving the way we are able to operate the QA System.

Finally, through the workflow process within M-Files we have been able to assign tasks and function to staff members required by our QA procedures which ensure that the necessary documentation is being undertaken for the ongoing implementation of our QA procedures.

Karen and her team have provided excellent support and worked with us through the whole QA implementation process.

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