St. Aloysius College has been educating girls in the heart of the Adelaide CBD since 1880.

The school’s academic programs offer a wide range of subjects to enable all students to pursue their passions. With an outstanding record of tertiary entrance, St. Aloysius College is proud of the many inspiring role models, including its talented teaching staff, who encourage all students to strive for excellence in their chosen fields.

Today, St. Aloysius College has approximately 1,300 students and 150 staff. Docuworx spoke with the college’s Business Manager Steven Andrews about how Docuworx is helping to facilitate St. Aloysius’ digital transformation journey.

What led you to seek a document management solution?

I was looking for a workflow solution rather than a document management solution. I had considered various products and eventually settled on DocuWare after trying an online trial with the software.

What is your current application for DocuWare? 

As of today, we are using it for our accounts payable automation, so primarily processing incoming invoices. By using the power of the DocuWare optical character recognition and workflow tools, invoices go through the approval process and then are stored. We capture and index the relevant data on the invoices into our financial system, then the invoices are paid.

How many DocuWare users do you have?

We started small, and presently, only two of us are using it. We are starting with baby steps with this product.

In the short term, we are trying to make sure the finance department is COVID-ready should we have to go into isolation and work remotely.

I imagine you have existing software that you use. Was it easy to integrate DocuWare?

The school software that we run is Synergetic. Yes, DocuWare has integrated with it. However, more important in my view was knowing that DocuWare can also integrate with anything we use in the future. So, it basically will be a front end to whatever ERP System we choose in the long term.

What have been the benefits of DocuWare so far?

DocuWare is quick to get up. One can use agile project management to get this done, which means it is faster than going through [structured project management method] PRINCE2. There is a choice to do it yourself, so it is flexible in that way also.

In my opinion, I would say DocuWare is an easy system to learn. The user interface is good. DocuWare doesn’t show too much at once but gradually feeds it.

We are still just in the user compliance testing stage, so it is still too early to see all the benefits. I hope that my accounts payable person will become more of a procurement person to look at the numbers and say, we could buy this better or do this smarter. With the time that DocuWare frees up, we are looking to reinvest that back into improving the quality of the organisation’s processes.

For me, an immediate benefit is also about being COVID-ready, because in my view, we are all going to get it at some point, or we are going to have to quarantine. Should this be the case, our invoices will still have to be authorised and paid, our employees will want to work. Thanks to DocuWare, it will be possible.

So right now, you are using it for accounts payable. What will be the next step in your digital transformation journey?

The dream is to use DocuWare for anything requested of corporate services. For instance, one of our 150 staff makes a request; it might be a purchase request or leave request, or anything that may need their authority.

We do not have the volume of accounts payable to hit that ROI as we are only doing 400 invoices a month. However, with 100 teachers, our highest cost is wages, approximately two-thirds of our total expenditure.

If I could move the needle even less than 1% in terms of efficiency in how they interact with admin, that would be a good return because it leads to better outcomes in the classroom, which ultimately makes us more successful.

Eventually, I would like us to use DocuWare across all departments and integrate it with our systems using its “Smart Connect” feature.

How long do you see this process taking?

I think a couple of years. We are taking a slow, cautious and measured approach.

The use of DocuWare to fix the staffs’ problems will see the beginning of gaining momentum. In my view, Smart Connect is the big thing that when we use it on a few things around student records will be massive.

That is the next step for me and where I see the value.

And how has Docuworx been throughout this process so far? 

I found the Docuworx team very good. However, it will be a long process, partly due to our budgetary constraints and partly due to us being cautious.

I like the simple step-by-step approach that we have gone through with Docuworx. I also appreciate they are not trying to sell me a box that prints paper at the end of the day.

Steven Andrews

Business Manager