March 2007

Further Education College invests in document delivery technology from Albany Software to streamline finance department and reduce costs

Sussex Downs College, the largest further education facility in the South East, has implemented electronic document delivery software from Albany Software, which eliminates the time and money spent on creating and distributing business documents manually. The eCONNECT software will be used by the college's finance department to produce and deliver a range of documents including invoices, purchase orders and remittances, in order to realise significant gains in productivity and efficiency.

With its main site located in Eastbourne, Sussex Downs provides a diverse selection of further education options including GCSEs, A levels, HNCs and 3rd level education and vocational courses, even encompassing its own travel agency for those learning about the leisure and tourism industry. The college comprises of a further large site in Lewes and other satellite educational centres throughout South Sussex. With over 1,000 members of staff and students aged 14 to 93, the college finance department is kept very busy.

Finance Manager, John Cripps, explains the need for the new solution, "When we make a payment to a supplier or member of staff we must send a remittance document informing them that the payment has been made. In the past we would incur significant costs and allocate a lot of staff hours printing, folding, and posting remittances. We had previously used a system that would fax the documents and if a fax number was not available, then the system would print the documents for manual posting. However, we wanted a system that would use email in the first instance. We make upwards of 15,000 payments a year and an increasing number of our suppliers do not use fax, so we were still producing large quantities of post."

Commenting on how users of the eCONNECT software have reacted to the new technology, Cripps says, "Our staff and suppliers are finding it a lot more convenient this way, and I have had positive feedback from individuals saying they really appreciate an email telling them their money will be in the bank on a certain day. We ensured that there was a big push in getting as many of our contacts' email addresses as possible, as email is now our default distribution method for remittances. However, where an email address is not available then eCONNECT will look for a fax number, or alternatively it will print out the remittance for it to be sent in the post. We simply collect the documents that require posting from the printer at the end of the day, but we now find that this number is getting less and less."

Cripps concludes, "eCONNECT is great for us, it just works away in the background making our lives easier without needing much attention from us - which is the way I like our IT systems to be!"

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