How Roger Williams University Achieved Nine Years of Integrated Workflow Success with Softdocs

Roger Williams University (RWU) launched Etrieve in 2017. Since then, the institution has built workflows that span nearly every major department on campus, including processes supporting everything from accounts payable and student refunds to payroll, leave of absence processing, and research.

The results are measurable: a 90% reduction in Title IV refund processing time, student refund turnaround time cut from a week to two days, and AP staffing reduced from 2 to 1.5 FTE.

RWU’s story demonstrates what is possible when a small team invests in steady growth—maturing alongside the platform, refining its approach and standards, and ultimately establishing a clear, methodical framework.  

The core development team—Mary Pittari, the Associate Director of Administrative Systems, and developer guru Al Roda—has built a methodology, a documentation standard, and a custom integration approach that together have transformed how work gets done across an entire campus.

For institutions navigating pressure to do more with less, RWU’s approach offers a blueprint. 

At a glance 

• 90% reduction in time spent processing Title IV student refunds 
• 1 week to 2 days student refund turnaround time, confirmed by the Bursar 
• 2 FTE to 1.5 FTE  reduction in AP manual workload through process optimization
• 9 years of continuous Etrieve deployment since go-live in 2017 
• 13 Departments/Constituencies have had at least one workflow built in Etrieve 

Starting Point: A Paper-Based Campus 

Before Etrieve, Roger Williams University ran much of its administrative processing on paper. The university's Bursar calls it ‘electronic paper’.

Staff managed spreadsheets, printed forms, collected physical signatures, and spent significant time on office-to-office communication.  When a stipend request or AP payment got lost, there was no way to know where it was or who was responsible for the next step. There was no formal workflow management system in place.

RWU had been a Softdocs customer before the Etrieve platform existed, using Softdocs Serve for purchase orders, AP checks, and payroll checks.  

When a need emerged for electronic forms and auditable workflow,  the university evaluated multiple vendors—including Hyland, which was significantly more expensive—before ultimately selecting Softdocs for its combination of capability and value. 

Getting Started: Ambitious from Day One 

RWU launched Etrieve with two forms: a stipend request and an AP payment request. Both are still the highest-volume forms on campus today. Neither was a simple process. Both were complex builds and involved deep ERP integration. 

RWU was one of the very first adopters of the cloud implementation of Etrieve. Form Builder was not yet fully available, so a Softdocs employee wrote the initial forms directly in code.

This early complexity set the tone for everything that followed. 

How Roger Williams University Builds Forms and Workflows 

While several members of RWU’s Administrative Systems Team work with Etrieve, three people spearhead the RWU Etrieve operation:

Mary Pittari manages project scoping, business analysis, functional specifications, and stakeholder coordination. Al Roda leads form development and maintenance, system administration for the Etrieve platform, and primary help desk support. Ryan Tiebout—Senior Director of Infrastructure and Data Analytics—provides the data warehouse and hybrid SQL server infrastructure critical to form development.

In addition to this core RWU team, Softdocs consultant Sara Roberts provides valuable support one day per week through RWU’s Professional Services Agreement.

An average form takes 6 to 8 months from discovery to go-live. Complex forms can take closer to a year. Every form is supported by roughly 10 internal documents—initiated during discovery, expanded through development, and iteratively versioned throughout the project lifecycle.

Documentation examples include:

• A workflow graphic, built outside Etrieve, used for discovery discussions with stakeholders 
• A form mockup showing the expected layout and fields 
• A data element map tracking every field name and its corresponding database element 
• Templates for all custom notification emails generated by the workflow 

That documentation standard is what makes this level of complexity sustainable for a small team. Stakeholders tend to try to replicate their existing paper processes, but as they see Etrieve working, they begin to understand what is actually possible, and the process improves in ways they did not anticipate. 

The shift from replicating what exists to rethinking what is possible is one of the most consistent patterns in RWU's nine years of builds. It is also why the goal was never simply to reduce paper.

The goal, as Pittari describes it, is to increase efficiency and reduce the resource burden of every process on campus. That takes time. Executive sponsors push back when a form takes eight months. Pittari's answer is straightforward: tell us what you need, and we can build it. But when you see it working, you will think of things you never even considered.

Building in stages is not inefficient. It is how the process actually improves.

Nine Years of Workflows Across Campus 

Roger Williams University has built solutions that support students as well as numerous stakeholder constituencies spanning Finance, Financial Aid, the Bursar's Office, Payroll, HR, General Counsel, Student Life, Registration, Research, and the Law School. 

Some workflows are owned by a single department, while others route through multiple departments, each with a vested interest.  Examples include:  

• Finance and Accounts Payable. The AP payment request, journal entry forms, and new vendor form account for some of the highest transaction volumes on campus. Eliminating the paper management burden allowed AP to reduce staffing from 2 FTE to 1.5 FTE.
• Bursar’s Office. A student refund request routes conditionally through Financial Aid based on refund type and dollar amount, sometimes requiring counselor outreach or supervisory approval before returning to the Bursar’s office for vouchering.  Student refund turnaround dropped from one week to two days. The Title IV processor now spends 10 percent of the time previously spent on that work. 
• HR and Payroll. Stipend processing bridges HR and Payroll. Student employment forms cover work-study and non-work-study positions through two separate workflows.  All are exceptionally high-volume workflows, and critical to daily hiring and compensation processing.

• Student Life. A leave of absence form and a student reinstatement form together touch Student Services, the Registrar’s office, Housing, the Bursar’s office, and Financial Aid. All five departments are invested in how those workflows run. 
• Research. RWU built a grant submission form in 2020 that was used for more than five years before the institution received funding for a dedicated grant system. A separate suite of forms supports research programs involving human studies.

A recurring feature across many of these workflows is the use of custom notification emails to stakeholders who are not approvers but need to know a process is in motion.

While building the leave of absence form, Pittari repeatedly asked who else needed to be informed regarding a student’s leave or return. The list grew over months as new groups were identified, including health services and the office of judicial affairs. That accumulation of notification logic reflects how the process improved as it was built, minimizing effort for departmental participants.

A Closer Look: The Contract Review Rebuild 

RWU's original contract review workflow did one thing: route a contract for legal review. The submitter selected their approver, and from there it went to the Office of General Counsel for triage, review, and execution.

That was it.  No Procurement review. No Finance check. No IT or Facilities input. 

The gap had real consequences. Departments sometimes contracted with vendors at standard market rates, unaware that the institution already had preferred agreements with more favorable pricing.  Budget accountability was limited, and potential downstream impacts were not consistently identified or vetted.  

A cabinet mandate directed the team to rebuild the process from the ground up. The new version adds Finance and Procurement as steps before a contract reaches legal review. IT and Facilities considerations are incorporated into data capture, and future phases are planned to add dedicated workflow steps.

Each stage is responsible for reviewing its respective domain—budget availability, existing vendor relationships, technical feasibility, and physical requirements. Legal review still happens. It just comes last, after the institution has already done its homework.

This represents one of the most complex and high-impact builds the team has undertaken.

ERP Integration: A Custom Architecture 

Roger Williams University runs Ellucian Colleague as its ERP. Rather than integrating Etrieve directly with Colleague through APIs, the institution leverages a custom data warehouse that ingests ERP data nightly, transforms it into a reporting-ready format, and makes it available to Etrieve through the hybrid server. 

The reason is practical. Colleague stores raw transactional data in a complex architecture that ensures accurate detail.  This makes it difficult to surface summarized data and reporting totals. The warehouse restructures ERP transactional data into more accessible, reporting-ready formats for Etrieve. 

Integration within workflows uses two methods: standalone integration steps within the workflow and direct writes from JavaScript within the form. Here's what this architecture enables:

• Forms pre-populate with ERP data automatically, with no manual re-entry
• Integration runs through the warehouse and hybrid server, not directly from Colleague
• Custom Etrieve reports give department heads an aggregate process view without requiring Etrieve Content
• Full audit trail on every transaction — who approved what, when, and where it went

The warehouse currently runs on a nightly refresh cycle, with a planned move toward real-time data.

What's Next for Roger Williams University 

In nine years, RWU has built workflows that touch every corner of campus, reduced manual work that once consumed entire roles, and turned a small team into the engine of institutional process improvement. Every department that sees what is possible wants in. 

Pittari identifies document management as the logical next chapter. RWU does not currently use Etrieve Content — when implementation has been considered in the past, campus-wide buy-in for a unified platform has been the barrier. When the institutional conditions are right, she sees content management as a natural – and beneficial - next step. 

Pittari has been involved in many vendor implementations across her career, including engagements that fell short of expectations. Regarding Softdocs, she was direct.

Nine years in, RWU is not done. They are not close to being done. The list grows because the platform grows with it, and every solved problem reveals three more worth solving.

RWU’s story offers a clear lesson: when a team commits to the right tools and deliberate, iterative growth—refining continuously and holding to consistent standards—even the most complex processes become manageable and ultimately transformative.