Digitising strategic meetings: a major challenge

Ascencio devotes entire days to preparing board meetings. Organisers need to manually encrypt the calendar on Outlook, draft formal notices in Word and PDF format, print all the documents for participants (agenda, proxy forms, appendices, etc.) and put together a booklet to be sent to committee members. And once the meeting’s over, they have to publish the minutes.

The whole process is tedious as well as costly in terms of time, money, and risk.
Each committee meeting involves an average of 10 documents, which are sent out by email, DHL delivery, or even by personal carrier in the event of an emergency. This cumbersome procedure means that even the slightest changes are extremely complex and time-consuming for everybody involved. Further, sensitive documents are shared with participants without an extra layer of security, thereby potentially increasing latent risk in terms of confidentiality.

It was clearly time to switch to a digital solution for organising board meetings.

• For staff, the objective is to simplify the process of preparing and distributing documents, to cut the time spent printing, producing and sending out booklets, and to gain greater flexibility, for last-minute changes, for example.
• For participants, the switch means being able to centralise the materials for meetings, accessing them at any time, from any device, and being able to view document history. Finally, for the information systems manager, the challenge is to share sensitive data securely and to comply with the GDPR.

For Stéphanie Vanden Broecke, Oodrive Meet ticks all the boxes. “It’s a solution that gives us the flexibility we need, while also fitting in with the new ways of working that we have had to adopt since the start of the pandemic. Being able to access documents at all times, from a variety of media, makes our work easier, while also ensuring absolute confidentiality, secure storage, and risk-free document transfers.”