Digital Transformation Leads to Operational Efficiency in Higher Ed

Colleges and universities must operate with maximum efficiency if they want to have the financial and organizational resources to deliver on their mission to educate and develop students.

At a time when the future is so uncertain, it is critical for schools to emphasize accuracy in their data, accountability in their technology, and have a foundation that will support change. Doing so requires that college IT departments commit to optimizing their technology foundation through the process of digital transformation.

Universities are complex ecosystems that require processes for HR management, financial aid and services, facilities management, capital expenditures, teaching tools, and now more than ever, options for remote learning. Key to having both focus and flexibility to deliver on this wide variety of tasks are workflow and process management.

By pivoting to embed different approaches to teaching and school administrative needs, colleges can transform the way they support their stakeholders and create continuous efficiency as part of the fabric of their normal operations. Business process management (BPM) supports the various needs of higher education functions because processes drive virtually all aspects of campus and academic life.

Lead the digital transformation of your institution with Process Director

BP Logix customers regularly cite Process Director for its agile approach to processes that ensure that 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. Additionally, higher educational institutions are often constrained by a limited budget, and Process Director BPM provides a foundation for delivering effective solutions in a cost-effective way.

Consider how schools are currently benefitting from their transformation efforts. With the creation and re-use of customized, automated processes IT teams are able to do the following

• Reduce dependence on manual and paper-based processes for student and staff
• Eliminate redundancies by creating a unified front-end for all campus digital needs.
• Deliver a better student self-service experience and empowering students to drive their educational paths.
• Streamline and reduce the steps involved in the review and approval process for requests.
• Track and summarize requests that needed to route through multiple departments before approval.
• Meet compliance and regulatory requirements and improve internal audit controls.

Let’s look at some examples of how these things are being realized by schools that have adopted Process Director to support their transformation needs.

Continuous growth, change, and innovation

Davis Applied Technology College (DATC) in Utah has made continuous improvement and transformation part of its strategy for growth and student success. It does this through digital delivery of programs to students and HR, finance, and other types of services to support staff.

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 recognized how the processes that were manifested in those forms would benefit from workflow automation.

The DATC IT team initiated their transformation efforts with the rapid deployment of Process Director to a number of departments in only a short amount of time. Positive outcomes came rather quickly; the student services department alone the school was able to deliver 17 completed processes within only a few quarters after being deployed. Finance, HR, and IT departments all showed measurable progress in short timeframes.

DATC’s Director of IT said, “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.”

Protecting and automating student records

UCF Global is part of the University of Central Florida system, and supports more than 64,000 students every year through 93 bachelors, 86 masters, and 27 doctoral courses of study.

A major challenge is handling the massive amount of private student data. While that data is 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 these requirements by providing:

• Granular permissions capabilities, with flexible (and temporary) privilege escalation.
• Comprehensive and automatic logging, with digital signatures, of every action taken by any actor, human or automated.
• Data encryption at rest and data in transit.
• Digital signature and verification of documents.

Digital transformation has helped UCF create a safe environment for transactions and storage of student data. They have been able to build processes that automate the flow of student information through all processes in the student lifecycle, from admissions to graduation.

Colleges and universities are preparing for a variety of different scenarios in both the near and long term. To help them have a foundation that enables agility, Process Director delivers digitally transformative education workflow solutions, which facilitates the efficient streamlining and management of information.