Why Organize?
Over time, you may accumulate a lot of records in your EPIC Account. You’ll also find that you spend a fair amount of time on the EPIC search screen trying to locate specific records. To make this easier, you’ll want to have a system for organizing your assessments in EPIC.
Much like your computer, EPIC uses folders for organization. Unlike your computer, however, EPIC only offers two levels: folders and subfolders. While that might seem limiting at first, we have found it to be sufficient–and it keeps you from creating a structure that ends up being too complex.
Recommendation for a Corporate Workshop
For typical corporate training classes, use a folder for a specific class. Within the class folder, create sub-folders for each instance of the class, or each session.
Let’s look at an example:
Suppose we have a class called, “New Manager Training”. We’ll make that a folder. Every time we create assessments for this class, we create a new folder and name it uniquely. We recommend using the class date in the folder name. So, if we have a class on January 8th, we might name the folder “2023–01–08”. A class in February would be named similarly.
If I had two classes in two different locations, I might add the city name, like this: “2020-01-08, Austin” and “2020-01-08, Columbus”. Or I might just include the city if that were to help me find it more quickly when making my selection on the search screen.
Organization Tips
Managing Years
I included the year to avoid confusion with next January’s class. and I put the year first. This is because folders and subfolders are always listed alphabetically. If I put the year last (01-08-2022″, the list will be sorted by month and day, making it harder to quickly find what I want.
If this class was held often, you might name the top folder something like, “New Manager 2023”, and create a new folder for each year. Otherwise you might end up with too many subfolders.
The trick is to balance the folder count so that it doesn’t get out of hand. The overriding goal with all of this is to be able to quickly find a set of records on the EPIC search screen.
Grouping by Class
Grouping by class makes a lot of sense because you will need to check to make sure all of the members of a class have completed the assessment. That also makes it simple to create a group report for the class. In both cases, you need only make selections for folder and subfolder to locate all of the records.
Order & Consistency
Remember to name the folders so that they appear “in order”, whatever that may be for your situation. And remember to be consistent, especially with date formatting, commas, hyphens, etc.
Make it Work for You
These are just some examples of how to organize your records. You may find a more efficient method that better meets your specific needs.
And know that you can always use the “Folder Maintenance” function, found under the “Manage Your Account” menu, to rename folders and move records from folder to folder.