Portland Community College (PCC) is a public community college in Portland, Oregon. As the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon, PCC serves nearly 70,000 full-time and part-time students.
Challenge
The PCC grants department engages with a wide range of constituents and stakeholders to develop grant proposals that fund vital college programs and activities. This process is further complicated by the many different college campuses and district offices the department works with -- each of which store and manage content in different places and manage workflows in their own ways.
“Our offices, programs, and workflows were all siloed,” says Vanessa Wood, Grants Director at PCC. “The only consistency was that most PCC departments and offices use Google tools, but this was typically content managed and stored in personal accounts and not in PCC-controlled repositories. Having the content stored in individual user accounts limited the Grants Office’s access to those pieces and made it difficult to share content with others when we didn’t own the content.”
Story
Before AODocs, the Grants Office used an internal drive for storing content and Gmail for managing review and approval processes. In this environment, employees had to manually save final versions of grant documents from their email to the internal drive because none of these systems were connected.
“Our internal system and process for managing grants was impractical and inefficient, but we made it work,” Wood explained. The department needed to standardize on a platform that could not only easily integrate with a database that is linked to document folders and records but also manage the complexity of grant workflows -- providing greater efficiency, organization, and time savings for employees. `
After evaluating the document management landscape, PCC chose AODocs. One factor behind the decision was AODocs’ tight integration with Google Drive. With PCC transitioning towards greater use of Google technology, AODocs not only aligned with the organization’s IT plans, but also promised to make adoption easier for its Google-savvy employees.
Results
The grants department began using AODocs in early 2019 and experienced immediate benefits from more efficient workflows and integration to Google Drive.
“Since we started using AODocs, the biggest benefits have come from the integration of the various systems within the department,” said Vanessa Wood. “Connecting the grants documents and folders with workflows and our existing database enables us to keep our grant processes more organized moving forward.”
PCC employees are finding that sharing and collaborating with AODocs is just as easy as their current sharing/collaboration platform because it is tightly integrated with the Google toolset. AODocs’ automation capabilities have also enabled PCC to better handle tedious, time-consuming tasks.
“The AODocs workflows have made a big difference and have automated many of our previously manual processes. The platform’s automation has enabled me to work more efficiently and faster”
Vanessa Wood, Grants Director at PCC
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