Higher education institutions must adhere to a disciplined cadence of organizational milestones in order to operate effectively. To manage workflows and processes, ensure that documentation is delivered and acted upon correctly, and instill accountability across all stakeholders is a hugely demanding job, irrespective of the size of the school. Low-code process automation is being employed by many higher educational organizations to help automate business processes around every aspect of the educational lifecycle, including student management, hiring, facilities, vendor management, capital expenditures, compliance and governance, and a host of other issues that demand continuous oversight and action.
Business process management (BPM) supports the various needs of a higher education administrator’s department, as processes drive virtually all aspects of campus and academic life. BP Logix customers regularly cite an agile approach to process which ensures higher education IT departments are able to serve a wide variety of stakeholders (administrators, parents, students, financial aid organizations, among others), and still maintain adherence to governmental, organizational, and industry governance requirements and compliance frameworks. Finally (but definitely not least importantly), higher educational institutions are often constrained by limited budget, and BPM provides a foundation for delivering effective solutions in a cost-effective way.
Process Director’s digital process automation capabilities enable schools to focus on what they do best: deliver quality education to students eager to improve their lives. Different schools look for various ways to achieve this, and the use cases of BP Logix customers illustrate how BPM can be a critical aspect of higher education digital transformation and organizational growth.
There are plenty of higher education BPM examples that show successful implementation and deployment of BPM Software across colleges and universities.
UCF Global is part of the University of Central Florida system, and acts as a hub for students and faculty who are studying and teaching abroad. In order to manage the thousands of students (the entire university system supports more than 64,000 students every year through 93 bachelors, 86 masters, and 27 doctoral courses of study.
A key challenge for UCF Global is handling the massive amount of private student data. While student records are protected by federal and state regulations, it’s also important for the school to build trust with students by doing everything possible to safeguard their data. Process Director helps solve for these requirements by providing:
By ensuring a safe environment for transactions and storage of student data, UCF has been able to build processes that automate the flow of student information through all processes in the student lifecycle, from admissions to graduation. UCF is a great higher education BPM example of success and efficiency.
For Davis Applied Technology College (DATC) in Utah, continuous innovation is core to its strategy for growth and student success. Another higher education BPM example, it uses Process Director for digital delivery of academic programs and other types of campus services, and it also supports staff by providing easy-to-use rapid application development capabilities to enable HR, finance, and other staff departments to create agile apps and process that are specific to their departmental needs.
Prior to using Process Director, these efforts were hampered by an outdated system of data collection and integration. The school had cabinets filled with paper forms but accessing them and applying them to digital routing channels was time consuming and inefficient. The IT team recognized how the processes that were manifested in those forms would benefit from workflow automation.
DATC's IT team created requirements, scope and criteria, then decided that Process Director BPM would be the most effective way to deliver on their goals. The IT team rolled out Process Director to a number of departments in only a short amount of time; in the student services department alone the school was able to deliver 17 completed processes within only a few quarters after being deployed. The Finance, HR and IT departments all showed massive progress in short tie. The Director of IT for DATC said of Process Director, “Knowing where our business processes and workflow are without having to chase them down is invaluable. What used to take days is taking hours — what used to take weeks is taking days.”
One of BP Logix’ higher education customers, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), used Earth Day as the impetus for adopting a BPM approach. With a mandate to reduce paper usage, the UTEP IT team embarked on a plan to eliminate paper where possible by relying instead on the digitization of forms through scanning and digital storage. It quickly became clear that efforts to improve reviews and approvals through digital means could lead to other efficiencies through BPM.
With the rollout of this new digital emphasis, the UTEP IT organization began to implement Process Director BPM across more parts of the University. They focused their efforts on 1) the easy movement of documents across campus via electronic workflows, 2) enabling the review and approval of electronic documents via email, 3) the ability to have dashboards that allowed users to edit, view and receive messages regarding activities and tasks as well as to retrieve reports, forms and notifications, 4) Having electronic records signed via a digitized image of a signature and 5) ability to populate a series of form fields by extracting information from a database instead of requiring users to input that data.
With broad usage of Process Director’s capabilities, UTEP has instilled an agile, prowess-driven mindset in how IT delivers solutions to various departments. Speed has been a critical driver, but so too is how comprehensive Process Director is at ensuring that necessary participants are included in reviews and other transactions throughout the various university lifecycles.
Higher education institutions are seeing more demand as young people come to rely on higher education as a path into the global economy. To serve these needs, Process Director is providing digitally transformative education workflow solutions, facilitating efficient distribution, as well as streamlining the monitoring and management of information.