Empower schools with Business Process Automation

Decrease administrative costs and increase efficiencies

On the one hand, education is a growing sector supported by private and government funding. Recent data shows that EdTech is worth more than $2.2 billion in revenue and continues to experience significant growth.¹  In addition, the Australian government’s funding for schools in 2022 is $25.3 billion with an additional $225.8 million dedicated to improving educational outcomes for students, particularly for those who are disadvantaged.

However, it’s still critical for schools to optimise their resources to find a balance between competing priorities and limited budgets. Many schools are reaching full capacity and are limited in terms of revenue. This makes it essential to free up valuable time and funds to invest in under-resourced departments and further growth. Educational institutions also need to innovate to stay ahead of the latest education trends.

While many educational institutions have already invested in digital systems, including data capture and enterprise content management to help streamline processes and manage student records and sensitive  information, there are more steps that can be taken to improve process efficiencies. Making smart investments in technologies that support business process automation (BPA) across administrative and operational tasks is one way that schools can save time, reduce costs, and focus on high-value priorities that create a better working and educational experience. 

How BPA supports educational institutions

A top priority for educational institutions is ensuring students, parents, families, and alumni have an exceptional experience. The challenge for many schools is that a small department is responsible for the large administrative and operational machine working behind the scenes to deliver that experience. Instead of focusing on strategic planning and implementation to support a quality educational experience, support staff are often weighed down by large volumes of paperwork and processing. Employing BPA creates strong and streamlined processes, the cornerstone of successful education institutions. 

BPA is therefore ideally suited to support:

• the facilities and building department with managing, reporting, and tracking incidents 
• the human resources department with teacher onboarding and offboarding processes
• the finance department with automating and improving invoice and school fee management
• the administration department’s archiving and records management. 

Key benefits of BPA in educational institutions

BPA is a simple, cost-effective solution that supports the automation of repetitive, data heavy, day-to-day tasks for administrative support staff. With the correct BPA system and processes in place, schools can optimise critical organisational workflows and processes to reduce costs, appropriately reallocate budgets, and drive productivity and operational excellence. 

BPA can empower your educational institution to: 

• Improve productivity leveraging digital solutions that automate processes can help your institution become more agile and productive by empowering staff to access student records faster, streamline finance processes, and even speed up enrolments.   
• Achieve efficiencies: manual business processes can be a barrier to efficiency; automating processes lets your staff work smarter and become more productive. 
• Reduce errors: automating processes can help eliminate human errors resulting from manual workflows. 
• Reduce costs: manual processes incur significant costs associated with time and resources; automation can eliminate unnecessary expenditure. 
• Improve collaboration: automated processes remove data silos and free up resources so that staff can collaborate more effectively.
• Make better decisions: the metrics and analytics that result from automated processes provide a more holistic and insightful view of students and their needs.
• Allocate funds more appropriately: reducing costs in one area means educational institutions can reinvest funds in under-resourced departments and innovation initiatives.

Build a transformation roadmap to chart your success

Every educational institution is at a different stage in its digital transformation journey. Some schools don’t know where to begin, while others have already started the journey, but are not leveraging the tools they have already invested in. 

Konica Minolta offers a range of consulting services, as well as ongoing support and maintenance, that will make sure you get the best solution to automate your processes and improve your workflows, now and into the future. A digital readiness assessment will help uncover your educational institution’s current state so that you can begin to build a transformation roadmap with a partner like Konica Minolta.

For more information on how Konica Minolta can help your education institution leverage BPA and uncover greater efficiencies, contact the team today.