Abingdon & Witney College Save Time and Money with FlowForma Process Automation

FlowForma^®, the leading provider of Process Automation tools for Microsoft Office 365^®, today announced that Abingdon & Witney College are replacing its paper-based business processes with the award-winning FlowForma Process Automation tool.

Abingdon & Witney College is an award-winning Further Education institution with three campuses and three satellite centres across Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. The college caters for almost 14,000 students and provides a vast range of part and full-time courses. With the ever-increasing number of students registering each year and with the reams of paperwork associated to each individual, the time had come for the organization to look at an online solution to relieve their paper problems.

A dependence had grown internally on paper-based processes within the business which required various members of management to authorize requests, resulting in documents often being lost and a slow turnaround on sign off. Upon exploring and training some members of staff in new business improvement techniques, the IT team came across the FlowForma Process Automation tool.

After seeing a demonstration, Mark Lay, Finance Director, Abingdon & Witney College knew he and his team had found the right solution and soon set about undertaking FlowForma’s SureStart training program, in order to get up and running quickly.

Once up to speed with the solution, a business improvement committee was developed internally to highlight processes for digitization, focusing on those which will save the college significant savings in time and money. To date the college has created eight processes in total. “We had a big list of paper-based processes that didn’t work well but we started by targeting the highest volume ones. There’s no point creating a process for something that’s only used once a month,” commented Mark Lay, Finance Director, Abingdon & Witney College.

A previously complicated Trips and Visits process is a primary example of the time saved annually for Abingdon & Witney College employees. Used to sign off on student excursions and requiring sign off from Health and Safety, Finance and Curriculum Managers, this process is now one streamlined workflow. In times past, this would typically have taken a week to complete, however, once digitized this can now be turned around in just one day.

Other time savings include:

• Trips and Visits – 1,665 hours
• Student Update Forms – 1,325 hours
• Task Risk Assessment – 620 hours
• Expense Claims – 402 hours
• Student Risk Assessment – 370 hours
• Accident and Incident Reporting – 320 hours

These time savings and more are further dissected and discussed in a webinar between FlowForma and Abingdon & Witney College which took place on October 17, 2019. The webinar recording is now available to access, which gives viewers the chance to gain a more in-depth understanding of Abingdon & Witney College’s digital transformation journey to date.

“We are delighted to assist Abingdon & Witney College on its quest to optimize their business processes across its entire organization, with a transparent solution to support key processes across its Finance, HR, and Payroll departments. Furthermore, we were pleased to a host a webinar with Abingdon & Witney College employees, who are seeing game-changing time savings first-hand.” commented Olivia Bushe, Chief Marketing Officer, FlowForma.