Orbis Education relies on Smartsheet to automate surveys, streamline contract renewals, easily manage online class schedules, as well as streamline many other day-to-day business critical process operations

Orbis Education, founded in 2003, develops, markets, and manages healthcare education solutions with higher education programs that help solve the labor shortage problem for hospitals and healthcare systems. Orbis partners with universities and healthcare organizations to deliver prelicensure nursing, occupational therapy, medical lab sciences, and other healthcare education programs that graduate thousands of practice-ready professionals to enter the workforce. 

Various Orbis teams rely on Smartsheet software to manage a wide range of activities from hiring, onboarding, account setups, payroll processes, task tracking, project management, deliverable schedules, curriculum development, product development, dashboards for leadership to single source information and access to reports, OKR and KPI tracking, team portals acting like a localized intranet, preventative maintenance, quality assurance, form and data collection, workflow triggers, and also to communicate with vendors and partners externally. For example, Orbis executives use Smartsheet to streamline information and run operations meetings; the Orbis nursing department relies on Smartsheet to manage all daily projects and track deliverables to partners; the Orbis e-learning team takes advantage of Smartsheet to ensure all courses run on schedule; and the Orbis business process team uses Smartsheet to track the onboarding of new hires and automatically send surveys to job specific recipients through centralized tracking and workflow triggers.

“Smartsheet fits the unique needs of all our departments at Orbis,” says Mark Gbur, Vice President of Product and e-learning for Orbis Education.

Before Orbis adopted Smartsheet, they used basic project management software and offline spreadsheets to manage vendor renewals, online class schedules, and other key business processes. “We wasted a lot of time editing duplicate documents and offline files, which we used email to communicate with students, faculty, partners, and vendors,” Gbur says. “We had manual processes that led to errors. Our critical information was outdated almost immediately after pushing send and it just felt like an antiquated and inefficient way to work.” 

Teams have been able to grow and scale solutions that were time intensive, error prone, and otherwise would have been personnel dependent. Originally the Orbis Business Process team relied on several software solutions to send out more than 20 satisfaction and net promoter surveys to faculty, academic coaches, and e-learning providers each semester. As the volume of surveys began to grow, it became hard to keep up with demand and a small project was suddenly consuming an inordinate amount of time for one team member, on the front end alone. “Prior to Smartsheet, every Monday, I would spend my time copying and pasting. The solution for data intake connecting multiple sources was unreliable, and 60 percent of the data that was missing from different teams for the surveys,” says Gina Smith, Director of Business Process Operations, Orbis Education.

“The number of surveys we were sending had quickly expanded from 20 to over 150 which included most of our partners and more internal teams, and we knew we had to automate the data collection process and eliminate manual steps to make everything more accurate and efficient.”  

Using Smartsheet to Manage Critical Business Processes

Orbis initially began using Smartsheet in 2010 to track and manage projects related to online courses. “We evaluated other products, but Smartsheet had the most functionality that would persist independent of an individual employee, and meet business needs,” says Gbur.

“I initially built a simple ticketing system in Smartsheet, and that became our single source of truth for our knowledge base. Eventually, any time data collection, data management, process or project management needs arose, Smartsheet became the obvious solution, and it was adopted more and more throughout the organization, and it has now permeated our entire culture here.”

More recently, Orbis began using Smartsheet Control Center to automate the survey management process. Smith and her team create Blueprints in Control Center to make sure tasks are aligned between different departments and the same data is used for project reporting.  Orbis realized it needed to simplify the process of splitting out data from different stakeholders in a self-sustaining and scalable manner.

Orbis also uses the Smartsheet document builder to automate mail merges from sheets into PDFs to generate contract signatures and renewals. “As staffing demands and hiring grew, we had to figure out how to easily manage the contracts and payroll processes,” says Smith. With Smartsheet document builder, Orbis created a simple PDF to automate the signing of new agreements for each semester. Because Smartsheet integrates with DocuSign electronic signature software, staff can sign employment agreements, with the data being automatically sent back to Smartsheet. “Now, at a glance in Smartsheet, we can see the status of each agreement because the latest version is there,” says Smith. Orbis even uses the same process to automatically manage student clinical skills evaluations.

In addition to these use cases, Orbis uses Smartsheet Dynamic View to share payroll processing information with managers for editing. “Dynamic View helps us control what someone else sees or doesn’t see,” says Smith. “We no longer need to manage permissions at the workspace or asset level.”

The organization also uses Smartsheet WorkApps to build simple apps for managing new assignments, enrollment projects, and staffing levels. “We use Dynamic View to streamline payroll management for our Directors of Nursing Services,” says Smith. “Also, using WorkApps, managers can view any payroll deductions that have changed. All of that updated data then flows into Smartsheet reports we send to our parent company for reporting.”

Automated Surveys and Streamlined Vendor Contract Renewal 

By automating Satisfaction Surveys in Smartsheet Control Center, Orbis has greatly increased the number of surveys it sends each semester. “Instead of only sending out 20 surveys each term, we now send over 150 staff satisfaction surveys each term because of the automation in Smartsheet Control Center,” says Smith. “This helps us reach more stakeholders so we can more easily take feedback into account when designing our programs.”

Orbis also gained significant time savings from using Smartsheet document builder to automatically generate staffing contracts, track statuses, and streamline the entire process. Previously, an Orbis finance employee would rely on email to manage contracts, a manual process that took too much time.

“It used to take 5-10 minutes to update or renew one contract, but now we can take action on over 50 contracts in under 5 minutes using Smartsheet,” Smith says. “Smartsheet was a game-changer for our finance department."

With the automation in Smartsheet, Orbis avoided the need to hire additional staff to facilitate sending and tracking contract renewals as volume grew.  

“With Smartsheet, the whole process of managing the business is more efficient, more optimized, more connected, and more reliable. Now, we can focus on our work instead of managing cumbersome isolated processes,” says Smith.

More Accurate Data and Simplified Communication 

With Smartsheet, Orbis has better visibility into project data, including historical data that allows users to easily view enrollment trends. “Previously, we relied on a single Smartsheet to meet our basic needs on enrollment data, but we overwrote the previous week’s data every week,” says Smith. “Using WorkApps, we can go back and look at all the historical data to see trends for certain periods. We can run reports to see how accurate our enrollment projections are, for example.”

Orbis has also simplified communication, both internally and with partners. “Smartsheet is definitely better than email for most of our communications,” says Gbur. “We’ve set up automated request updates, so I get notifications when there are changes, and I no longer have to chase people down via phone or email to get status updates on training or onboarding sessions for faculty or staff.”

Orbis plans to expand its use of Smartsheet tools such as Dynamic View and WorkApps as the business grows. “Whether we’re using dashboards, sheets, or reports, we drive all our day-to-day functionality through Smartsheet,” says Gbur.

“Time and time again, we keep discovering that Smartsheet is the answer to our problems,” says Gbur.