%20(2).png)
Find out how Inpute successfully migrated in excess of eight hundred thousand documents from the University of Limerick’s legacy system and delivered significant process efficiencies with a new document storage and retrieval system that’s both secure and easy to use.
The University of Limerick’s (UL) HR and Academic Registry teams process hundreds of documents every week, from recruitment packs and staff contracts to student funding and enrolment forms. These had been stored in a system that was difficult to use and sealed off from all other systems in the university.
Inpute created a secure document storage and retrieval system and oversaw the migration of documents from the legacy system. By integrating the Inpute solution with existing systems, staff in both Academic Registry and HR can now upload new files effortlessly, while the process of retrieving data is streamlined and intuitive.
“Inpute have been fantastic to deal with. The quality of the support they provide is excellent. Questions are answered within the hour, and everyone we dealt with was knowledgeable and up-to-speed.”
Enterprise Analyst, University of Limerick
Established in 1972, University of Limerick is an independent research-led university offering undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across arts, humanities and social sciences; education and health sciences, science and engineering and the Kemmy Business School. It has over 18,000 students and approximately 2,000 staff.
Every week, the academic registry and human resources departments process hundreds of documents – everything from student emails about grade rechecks and course changes to queries from staff about pensions and benefits. All of these documents must be stored securely and retrieved easily and intuitively.
Prior to Inpute’s involvement, documents were managed on a standalone, outdated system. New documents had to be uploaded individually. Searching for and locating information was slow, cumbersome and error prone.
Inpute implemented a secure document storage and retrieval solution tailored to the requirements of the University of Limerick’s HR and academic services functions.
The project began with a thorough assessment of both the existing system and client needs. As part of that process, Inpute conducted a series of workshops with stakeholders in both departments. The changeover gave staff an opportunity to say what wasn’t working with the old system, and what they would like to see in the new one.
Migrating in excess of eight hundred thousand documents from the legacy system was one of the central challenges of the project. Because the old and the new systems differed significantly, the implementation team had to map individual fields within each document, then validate the data before securely transferring each document to the new system in a new format.
Integrating with existing systems played a critical role in the project. All relevant documents can now be automatically uploaded to the system via MS Outlook. Further integrations with both the student records system and the HR database allow users to retrieve data using nothing more than a student ID number on the admissions side, or an employee number on the HR side. In addition, the system’s capture capability means that users can also carry out text-based searches if required.
Security is mission critical at UL. Users are authenticated via single sign-on (SSO), and there is full audit trail: every action on the system is logged so that managers can see who did what and when.
Mark O’Leary of the University of Limerick says that requests and queries arriving into HR and student admissions can now be fulfilled instantly.
“If someone says, ‘I need an employee file from five years ago’, no one has to go digging to try to find it. All they need is the employee number and they can locate any document easily.”
The fact that the new system is now integrated with other systems in the university has helped deliver a range of benefits. It’s easy to set up new users on the system. Similarly, setting up new groups or new categories, or rolling out to new departments does not require developer support.
Mark O’Leary singles out the link with the mail system as particularly powerful. “Being able to do things straight from Outlook has been amazing from the end user’s point of view. They don't need to store documents in a folder, or retain duplicates or anything like that. Today, any documents that come in can be stored automatically in the system.”
“It’s incredibly straight-forward and user-friendly.”
“University of Limerick had a number of key requirements; security, integration with existing systems and cross departmental functionality. This solution delivered in all of these areas and more.”
CRO Inpute
.gif){kind=logo}
