Workflow

ICT Platform Improves Collaboration within Universities

Bucharest (RO), July 2009 - (by Elena Lita) SIVECO Romania is extending its experience in research and development of information platforms dedicated to the education sector through the SUNIDOC national project. The SUNIDOC project will provide Romanian educational institutions with a flexible and efficient tool for document management, able to integrate with other existing systems.




SUNIDOC is coordinated by SIVECO Romania and funded by the Managerial Agency for Scientific Research, Innovation and Technological Transfer - an institution coordinated by the Romanian Ministry of Education, Research and Youth.

SIVECO Romania partners in this project with the University Politehnica of Bucharest, so the system that resulted from the research-and-development project will be tested within the University. It will be active both for the University's Rectorate, as well as for its thirteen faculties.

The system will ensure efficient management for the documents and processes specific to a university, including the automation of activities for all entities - from department level to Rectorate. It will also support the production of academic statistics by collecting data from forms or by importing it from external sources.

Furthermore, the system will offer support for the institutional internal check, as well as for document management of the University's entire workflow, assuring the necessary mechanisms for using electronic signatures on documents.

The research project aims at building a platform dedicated to the improvement of cooperation and growing collaborative labor productivity within a university. It will provide users with easy access to documents and the possibility to perform their tasks efficiently, as well as assure the communication between universities' administrative units.

Thus, the educational institution will benefit from integrated archiving, retrieval, and data management, and also from support for generating reports and statistics regarding academic activity. Moreover, the system will offer the possibility for generation and centralized administration of electronic forms, fostering great efficiency for users' data input and offering a high degree of correctness and completion.

"The system will allow an efficient recovery of the information and the historical documents held by the University. It will provide the necessary mechanisms for integrating with a text scanning and recognition system (OCR), in order to achieve a knowledge database obtained through further integration with other systems. The database will be used in subsequent research projects, providing a source of information necessary and useful as a starting point in the scientific activity-, said Ionut Arsene, responsible for scientific projects within SIVECO Romania.

The development and testing process of the document and workflow management system also give opportunities to identify new ways to grow efficiency in the communication flows and, if necessary, to trigger proposals for modification of the current way of deploying certain activities.

The date of the project's completion is September 2010.