Form Capture – Specialist Schools and Academies Trust

Case Study – Specialist Schools and Academies Trust

Our Client

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) are an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation dedicated to raising levels of achievement in education. They have a membership of over 5,700 schools and organisations.

The Client’s Problem

SSAT host hundreds of different training courses across the United Kingdom for students and teachers annually. The primary goal of SSAT is to raise standards in education and therefore feedback from their attendees in the form of evaluation forms, issued on the day of the course are key to the ongoing improvement of their services.

The daily volume of these evaluation forms was causing SSAT considerable problems. Temporary staff had to be hired alongside permanent staff to manually enter the forms into MS Excel spread sheets. This task was not only arduous and expensive but also was open to a large margin of error.

Our  Solution

CMS Software introduced FormStorm Enterprise to the evaluation process. The forms were redesigned by SSAT with advice by CMS on the best design for data extraction. The system was created and installed at the head office plus three remote sites and immediate benefits were realised.

Business Benefits

  • 80% of forms automatically recognised without need for human validation remaining 20% are handwritten comments from attendees. These were extracted by FormStorm but validated by verify users.
  • Employment of temporary staff no longer required.
  • Resulting data exported directly into a database for collection by SSAT management systems.
  • Additional spread sheet version automatically generated for staff use.
  • Connection created to SSAT management system to validate attendee ID and courses.
  • Increase in efficiency and large reduction in error rates.
  • Reliable automatic export of data.
  • Stable and robust system which has generated hardly any operational support calls.
  • Due to its success FormStorm is shortly to be reviewed for expansion to other areas of the SSAT.

“…The solution implemented by CMS has been reliable and has met all our objectives. We are now able to capture, verify and interrogate the data better than ever. Their customer service has been outstanding with any issue being resolved promptly, for anyone with the same needs I would happily recommend them.”

Elliot Harrison, Data Office SSAT

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