Treeno Software: The Pathway to Operational Excellence

Lisa McCoole, COO and VP of Worldwide Sales

Today’s schools process vast amounts of administrative paperwork such as students’ medical records, independent education plans, and transcripts, among others. Securing this information and making it accessible to the school and district authorities as required, especially when students change schools, is not only complicated but also administratively difficult and time-consuming. Treeno Software integrates with student information systems to automate the storage of student records and organize paperwork into distinct folders, thereby reducing the burden of managing and securing these records manually. Treeno’s Enterprise Document Management Solution support managing student documents in a highly secure and audited system. In addition to student files, schools today also store personnel files, payroll documents, expense request, invoices, contracts and more. Lisa McCoole, COO and Vice President of Worldwide Sales, discusses the trends and challenges in the education sector, highlighting how Treeno simplifies the organization of school records through automation and integration.

1. Can you elaborate on your software solution for the education system?

Treeno Software provides document management and workflow automation solutions for schools and districts. Treeno integrates with Student Information Systems and accounting applications to simplify the filing and retrieval of documents associated with the student, employee or financial transactions. Acting as an extension of Student Information System, permissioned users can have one click retrieval of the associated documents.

Treeno’s file import and barcode technology also helps to reduce costs associated with the scanning of historical documents. By leveraging the Treeno bar coding feature, scanned documents can be automatically routed to their respective folder without any manual indexing. Imaging the historical files protects these documents throughout their lifecycle. No longer does the district need to be concerned with documents being misfiled, lost, stolen or degraded. Storage rooms can be repurposed back into classroom or administrative spaces.

Treeno Software is a secure, web-based application. Documents can be made accessible to the required authority wherever necessary. Treeno’s web-based solution is quicker to deploy and easier to support, saving the district money in the solution roll out process and ongoing support fees.

2. How can a client obtain the Treeno product and what is its stance with regard to security?

Our software can be purchased in two ways— customers can either purchase it and install it on a server at their site or utilize our cloud hosting option. Cloud hosting is one of the most rapidly growing trends in education as most schools prefer not to maintain the server hardware, operating systems and back-up solutions required to maintain or support an on-premise deployment. Treeno’s easy and cost-effective hosted solution allows school districts to store their documents in the cloud without incurring major expenses. To ensure the safety and security of sensitive data, users must authenticate to the system and are only granted access to documents they are permissioned to access. The activity of each user is audited and tracked. Treeno sets up an encrypted connection as each user logs in to the server. The Treeno hosted servers are located at SSAE- 18 certified hosting locations. The hosting facilities ensure the security of documents by building a virtual fortress around them with round-the-clock staff monitoring to prevent threats to the system.

Treeno integrates with the school’s student information system, and aids in auto-filing, labeling and linking of documents

3. Can you elaborate on your strategy to cater to customers?

Treeno consults with our customers. Our goal is to learn what their biggest challenges are in managing their documents and prioritize them based on the importance to the client. Treeno meets with stakeholders and documents how the customer currently organizes their files, who should be permissioned to access the records and if the documents need to be routed to users for approval and processing. Treeno will also evaluate if integration with the student information system or accounting application would save money and time on filing and/or retrieval. Once we understand the needs of the customer, Treeno sets up the system, test and verifies the implementation and trains the customer. Ongoing support is provided.

4. Can you provide a case study to illustrate the benefits provided by your solution?

While working with school districts, we identified a major need for automated form submission. This problem came to the forefront in Olympia School District, where the travel expense management process had become difficult to manage, with 19 schools and hundreds and hundreds of employees. Based on the complex approval process, a travel expense form for one employee could be routed in one of a hundred different approval processes that were being managed manually. Treeno came to the rescue by creating a fillable PDF form that could be downloaded and filled out by anyone in the school district. The submission of this document in the document management system triggers a workflow and the built-in intelligence helps to recognize the school of origin and if an additional funding department would subsidize the expense. Our automated intelligence-based system ensured the effective routing of documents as per the client’s requirement.

5. How has the past year been for Treeno?

The major highlights of 2017 have been Treeno’s success with the fillable PDF form technology and dynamic workflow intelligence, which have simplified and enhanced the automation of approval processing for school districts.

6. What does the road ahead look like for Treeno?

Our investment in integrating with the Skyward application, a well-known student information system, has proven to be highly beneficial. We are currently working on introducing Treeno’s integrated solution to the users of the Skyward application to demonstrate the added benefits derived by integrating Treeno Software with their student information system.