Among the most common benefits RTOs look for these days are: usability, functionality, productivity and flexibility. Of course there's also cost. I'm not aiming to solve all your headaches today, but tell me: as an RTO, which of these are important to you?
- Certificates
- Reports
- Study Plans
- Workbooks
- Assignments
- Formal training plans
- Standard letters
- Letter of Offer
- Reports
My guess is you would have said YES to at least 3 items. Now, just one more question: If you could automate all the above using your trusted and familiar office tools like MS Word and MS Excel, linked to your student management data for a paltry $9.95 per user, per month would you be interested?
Forgive me for sounding like a starry-eyed used car salesman, but this has to be one of the most exciting little RTO widgets I've seen in a long time.
What am I talking about?
Excel-to-Word Document Automation by AnalysisPlace.
What is it?
Excel-to-Word Document Automation does exactly what it says on the box. It allows you to create personalised documents using MS Word Templates from the data stored in an Excel file. So let's say you had a CSV export from your student management system with a list of all the certificate data for a cohort of graduating students. Your Excel WorkBook includes a set of nicely formatted, watermarked and branded certificate templates that you and your team created. Each field in each template corresponds to a column in the CSV file, i.e. your data source. Now, just like mail-merge you can generate a batch of Certificates, SoAs, and Testamurs for each successful learner. That's just one example. The same applies to all the documents in the list above.
What are the benefits?
Basically, everything we listed as "the most common benefits RTOs are looking for today"
- Usability - No issues here. Just about everyone knows how to use MS Word and MS Excel.
- Functionality - Two powerful office tools, collaborating to automate your key documents.
- Productivity - Let your systems do the heavy lifting through accurate and repeatable automation.
- Flexibility - Your templates, your data your, your reports - puts you in control of the workflow
- Cost - Starts at $9.95 US per user, per month
Icing on the cake
Lets say you also have Microsoft Office 365 and the Bluegem API Connector for Office 365. Now, we can take all the benefits listed above and amplify them 100 times. Because this combination uses the power of Microsoft Power Automate (in Office 365) to also integrate, email delivery, custom workflows auto-populates the excel files used to create your personlised Word Documents, and can deliver them by email as Word or PDF.
What would that do for your productivity?