The Grant Management Challenge

A grant's creation and awarding is often time-consuming. Whether it is fund management, grant tracking, or maintaining communication with grant recipients, agencies need a tool to help consolidate grant information and make it readily available.

In many cases, aging, poorly-integrated systems have made it difficult to find or share information, create reports, or complete audits. For staff that issue and track grants to completion, it's a challenge that can directly affect their ability to provide transparency to the people they serve.

The Solution: Column Case Management

To help, Column Technologies offers Column Case Management’s Grant Management module, a collaborative, web-based solution for public and private organizations. Easy to implement and easy to maintain, its powerful content and records management, collaboration, and workflow automation features increase efficiency and help deliver high quality service.

The Grant Management module can help your organization streamline the full grant management process from approval and application processing through to fund distribution and tracking. It also helps your organization’s decision-makers quickly and efficiently shares information, review applications, and select the most deserving recipients.

No matter how your public or private organization works, you can tailor Column Case Management to your exact needs, deploy on any scale, and then quickly and easily make changes.

View the Case Management - Grant Management datasheet (PDF: 100 KB).

Case Management Benefits

From our inception, Column Technologies has helped public and private organizations transform how they conduct business. Today, Column Case Management's enterprise features and interoperability with your other technology allows your staff to:

• Enhance record, document, and evidence management

Column Case Management's Grant Management module replaces paper-based case folders with secure, case-specific virtual workspaces. Here, users can coordinate their work and manage unstructured content such as Microsoft Office and PDF documents, HTML files, e-mail messages, images, forms—even audio and video files.

• Improve security and audit procedures

Rigorous access and audit controls—including user, role, and group-level security, data encryption, and complete audit trails—promote information sharing while fulfilling your responsibility to protect privacy and personally identifiable information.

• Increase data quality

Powerful data quality management tools use business rules and real-time logic to validate, cleanse, and integrate data. The result? Accurate, timely, and complete information that supports good decision making without compromising speed and efficiency.

• Improve information access with search and data visualization

When you need to find information, you can securely search all sources, including documents, web pages, attachments, forms, and activity logs. You also have access to Thinkmap, a powerful data visualization technology that can help you uncover relationships among people, locations, property, organizations, and other data elements.

• Increase efficiency with electronic forms and customizable workflows

Built on the BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS)—a workflow engine used by some 7,000 organizations worldwide and over 80% of the Fortune 500—Column Case Management can effectively automate manual, time-intensive activities.

With ARS, workflow rules can send notifications or information, create or escalate assignments, request approvals, and update data—even automatically create and send correspondence based on case information. You can also build track-able electronic forms that reduce errors and rework and then link them to cases.

• Access to up-to-the minute data with a customizable reports console

Powerful reporting and dashboard consoles provide real-time performance metrics and fully integrate with a wide variety of business intelligence solutions. Each module includes a large number of standard reports and dashboards as well as the ability to create custom reports and ad-hoc queries. If rolled-up data demands an explanation, you can easily drill down for more detail.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Solutions

Column Technologies' software-as-a-service (SaaS) option for the Grant Management module allows your organization the benefits of an integrated case management solution. SaaS delivery limits installation, maintenance, and staffing costs while eliminating the hassles of upgrades, backups, and management challenges. Your SaaS-enabled case management solution resides on Column's servers, and your users access it through secure Internet connections.

To learn how Column's Case Management Solution can improve performance while reducing costs and risk, you can contact a Column office, have Column contact you, or chat with a Column representative.