Banner Document Management Suite (BDMS) for Advancement Services at St. John's University MN (SJU) went live on 8/24/2009. The implementation of BDMS has helped us in achieving sustainability goals, maximizing the utilization of office space, and securing documents.

There were three steps that SJU Advancement Services went through to implement BDMS: Firstly, Advancement Services needed to determine which documents would be destroyed/retained after being scanned. A committee of 8 individuals was developed and the areas represented were: Annual Fund, Planned Giving, Stewardship, Development, Prospect Research, and Advancement Services. To develop logical indexes, the committee reviewed random files of constituents to determine the types of documents which were in the files. Once this was established – the index system was presented to the cabinet level of Institutional Advancement.

Secondly, to implement the index system proposed in the requirements into BDMS, a new custom BDMS Application was created. To ensure the quality of this custom Application, SJU Advancement Services consulted with SunGard before rolling out this Application for testing and production.

Finally, procedures were created to guide staff members responsible for scanning and retrieving documents to/from BDMS. This presentation is going to elaborate on the three steps above.