Elon University turned to Softdocs in 2018 with a straightforward need: replace Fortis, a document archival system that was sunsetting. What followed was almost a decade of steady expansion.
Today, Etrieve runs across the Registrar, Purchasing, Financial Aid, the Law School, and HR, with 84 forms currently published, seasonal, or in development and more than 150 non-test forms built in the system.
Contracts that once sat on a desk for weeks now have a 17-hour median turnaround. The Withdrawal Coordination workflow processes students in an average of 21 days, finishing 9 days ahead of the financial aid deadline, with every department tracking progress in real time.
Contracts auto-file. Notifications are sent automatically. Department heads manage their own queues. What started as a solution to a retiring archive system turned into a foundation for continuous process improvement across the university.
Results at a Glance
- 17-hour median contract workflow completion time, down from weeks or months on paper
- 6-day average end-to-end contract turnaround, per eDocs reporting
- 21-day Withdrawal Coordination average throughput, completing 9 days before the financial aid deadline
- 84 forms currently published, seasonal, or in development; 150+ total non-test forms in the system
- 8 years of continuous Etrieve deployment since go-live in 2018
- 6 areas of campus running on Etrieve: Registrar, Purchasing, Financial Aid, Law School, HR, and COVID response
Starting Point: A Campus Running on Paper
Fortis, Elon’s previous document management system, could file and retrieve documents. That was it. No routing. No approvals. No visibility into where a process stood. Offices walked paper from desk to desk, and once a contract landed in Purchasing, the person who submitted it had no way of knowing what happened next. Purchasing fielded status calls they often could not answer.
When Fortis reached end of life, Elon conducted an RFP and brought department stakeholders into the evaluation process. Those stakeholders had experienced the system’s limitations firsthand. They provided a clear picture of what they needed: forms, routing, and approvals in a single platform that could work alongside Colleague, Elon’s ERP and student information system.
Softdocs offered all three. Its partnership with Ellucian meant Etrieve was already designed to integrate with Colleague. Departments participated in product demonstrations before any decision was made, and by the time Elon went live in 2018, the offices that would use the system had already chosen it.
Getting Started: From Archival to Campus-Wide Workflows
Elon went live in 2018, starting with document migration and archival, then expanded to forms and workflow across additional departments as they scaled with the Etrieve platform.
COVID accelerated that shift. When the university had to move off paper, Elon used Etrieve to track and coordinate COVID testing — an unconventional use case that showed just how deeply the platform had become part of the institution’s day-to-day operations.
During its expansion of Etrieve, Elon transitioned from on-premises hosting to the cloud. The move included updates to reporting structures and workflows, helping position the platform for continued growth.
The team has grown alongside the platform. Initially, three Central IT developers shared responsibility for the Etrieve platform while supporting other initiatives, each building expertise with different campus offices. Elon later added a dedicated Forms Solutions Specialist focused on Etrieve and advanced JavaScript development, as well as a Power Automate developer, further expanding its process automation capabilities, but the previous developers provided excellent backup support if needed.
Eight Years of Workflows Across Campus
Today, Etrieve runs across six areas of campus. Financial Aid handles high-volume form intake with real-time tracking. The Law School manages student onboarding within a five-day window with full visibility into completion status. Purchasing transformed a fully manual contract process into a measured, accountable workflow. HR is next.
The Registrar’s office was among the earliest adopters and has gone fully paperless on student-facing processes.
Each new deployment created momentum for the next. As departments saw the efficiency, visibility, and automation their peers had achieved with Etrieve, adoption continued to spread across campus.
A Closer Look: The Contract Cover Sheet
Before Etrieve, the contract process lacked transparency. Once a contract was submitted, departments had little visibility into its status, where it was in the approval chain, or who was responsible for the next step.
The contract cover sheet workflow transformed contract management from a black box into a transparent, trackable process. The team built:
- Multi-step approval workflow with conditional routing
- Automatic filing of completed contracts into the university’s vendor software
- Dashboard flags for contracts sitting longer than five days
- Automated reminders that replace manual follow-up calls
- Department head self-service queue management
The median time from initiator to Purchasing is now 17 hours. Average end-to-end completion is approximately 6 days with approvals sometimes extending to the Provost and/or Presidential level. Requesters track their own contracts. Purchasing manages the queue instead of the phone.
A Closer Look: Withdrawal Coordination
A student withdrawal triggers responsibilities across multiple departments simultaneously. Before Etrieve, coordinating those efforts relied on inbox management, spreadsheet tracking, and manual follow-up to determine who had completed their part of the process. Nothing was automated. Nothing provided a complete view of progress.
Now, when a student withdraws, a Colleague email notification automatically triggers form pre-population and routes the process directly to Student Financial Services. Every department involved tracks progress through a live JavaScript dashboard. Automated notifications prompt action when needed and flag forms that have remained in a queue too long.
The workflow moves students through the process in an average of 21 days, keeping the university consistently nine days ahead of the financial aid deadline built into the process as a safeguard.
How Elon Builds: The JavaScript Advantage
JavaScript offers Elon’s team the ability to build forms that work the way departments actually work, not the way a standard form template assumes they do.
The Etrieve platform offers a classic form builder that lets the team write custom logic directly into the form, enabling conditional behavior, live data population, and guided workflows. Four examples show the range:
- Robert’s Academy forms: Mirror required templates exactly, including nontraditional field structures, with data drawn live from SharePoint lists.
- London application: Guides applicants through a multi-step process using conditional workflow logic, with Excel integration pre-populating form data.
- Stipend request form: In development with CSV bulk upload support for high-volume payroll and compensation processing.
- Withdrawal Coordination: Drives a live dashboard that gives every department real-time visibility into student withdrawal status.
In each case, the form fits the department, not the other way around.
Extending the Platform: Etrieve and Power Automate
Power Automate connects Etrieve to the rest of Elon’s technology stack. The integrations the team has built extend the platform’s reach without requiring every process to live inside it:
- Teams into Etrieve Content: Files dropped into Microsoft Teams automatically archive to Etrieve Content, with minimal steps.
- Withdrawal Coordination pre-fill: The Colleague email notification triggers automatic form population and routing to Student Financial Services on submission.
- Excel and SharePoint integration: The London and PACE applications draw live data from Excel; Robert’s Academy forms pull from SharePoint lists.
- PDF generation: Power Automate and Azure Functions generate and distribute completed form PDFs automatically.
Etrieve handles routing, approvals, and archival. Power Automate handles the data connections. Together, they give end users a seamless experience across the full workflow.
What’s Next for Elon University
Colleague integration is at the top of Elon’s roadmap. Connecting Etrieve workflows directly to the ERP would eliminate manual re-entry, strengthen data integrity, and complete the automation loop from submission to system of record.
Employee onboarding signing is up next. Elon currently uses a separate tool for new hire document signing, but documents belong to whoever initiates them, limiting visibility for the rest of the team. Moving signing into Etrieve would bring onboarding into the same transparent workflow model that now runs across the rest of campus.
Looking ahead, Elon also sees opportunities to expand automation in HR through Personnel Action Request workflows for employee changes such as transfers, compensation adjustments, and terminations. For transfers in particular, automated routing could help ensure required access changes happen consistently and close a recurring compliance gap.
Eight years ago, Elon needed a place to store documents. Today, the Etrieve platform runs across six areas of campus with 84 active forms, JavaScript-powered dashboards, and automated workflows that have significantly reduced manual coordination. What began as a replacement for a retiring archive system has become a platform for visibility, accountability, and continuous process improvement across the university.
