- CASE STUDY -

Trinity College Dublin School of Nursing & Midwifery

Trading the madness of a manual process for the flexibility of an online system

About the conference

Jeni Ryan has been organising events for over ten years for Trinity College Dublin School of Nursing & Midwifery. She uses Ex Ordo for the School’s flagship event, the Healthcare Interdisciplinary Research Conference.

The madness of a manual process

Before using Ex Ordo, Jeni used to handle the entire process of collecting, reviewing and accepting more than 400 papers manually.

From submission to book of abstracts, her manual process would have taken close to 50% of her working year and it primarily involved emails, Word and excel files. On top of receiving the submissions via email, processing them individually, and assigning them evenly to the reviewers, she then had to print them to hand them out to each reviewer. That was 1200 sheets of paper stapled together and divided into piles! She would then send acceptance letters by post mail along with the registration form.

Jeni had to close submissions at the end of March to allow time for all this to happen before the conference in November

Part of me relished the process but I can remember sitting at home with my laptop and the monitor of my computer until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning to try to get things done.

From sleepless nights to the flexibility of an online system

In 2012, she heard about Ex Ordo from a former colleague

I had thought about using software but without really looking for one. The solution was presented to me by a former colleague of mine who had used the system and had found it very good.
Now everything happens online. Even though some people were a bit reluctant to change as is always the case when adopting new habits, using Ex Ordo has made everybody’s life much easier.
I can log in from anywhere to monitor submissions coming in or the reviewers’ progress. There is no doubt that it also improved things for authors and reviewers. They can go online, log in and out and have control of the system to upload or review submissions. If they have any problem, they can contact Ex Ordo’s friendly support team. Now, I have reviewers outside Ireland.

More time for new projects

Ex Ordo has reduced Jeni’s workload significantly. Her reviewing and acceptance process are more efficient and she can now close submission at the beginning of June

Using Ex Ordo is more professional: it helps me present a professional front for my event and I get a professional service.
The whole process now takes up around 25% of my time, which means I have more time available to do other things that may generate money or promote the school.

Organisation: 

Trinity College Dublin
School of Nursing & Midwifery

Type: University

Organiser: Jeni Ryan. Administrator

Domain: Healthcare

Submissions: 200 - 300

3 words to describe Ex Ordo?
Time saving / Professional / Value for money

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