CSU Stanislaus Students Enjoy A+ Digital Experience

The Cal State Stanislaus campus had been trying to move from paper to electronic forms and processes for many years. 

“When I first got there eight years or so ago, we were almost completely paper-based,” said John Rezendes, Supervising Programmer in Information Services. “We developed our own internal tools to build electronic forms and a workflow engine.” 

This approach worked, but it required intensive development resources and time to make it happen. When they heard that one of Stanislaus’ sister campuses began a pilot program with BP Logix’s low-code business automation platform, Process Director, they jumped aboard the initiative. 

Then, COVID-19 hit...

Like colleges all around the country, CSUS was forced to close its campus due to COVID-19. Members of the school’s IT department thought they’d have to scramble to create new workflow arrangements to be able to offer all the school’s courses online. But it turned out they were preparing for the change all along without even knowing it, thanks to Process Director. 

The solution 

Process Director allows schools to easily move from paper forms and audit trials to digital ones with automated workflows. Higher-education institutions have reduced implementation time by an average of 70% and improved process responsiveness by 50%. 

“As soon as we determined our campus was going remote, we met to determine what students needed," Rezendes explains. "We had a number of systems already online but didn’t have interactions for a lot of the transactions that trigger responses for a student changing or dropping a course, or if they need a refund for parking because they’re no longer coming to campus. Those ancillary processes didn’t fit our student or financial systems cleanly with an electronic process to automate them."

That's when they realized Process Director would be the perfect tool to remedy this challenge. The easy-to-use, low-code platform quickly became the glue between CSUS' standard business tools for students, finances, and human resources. 

"Process Director provided a way to get data from students, staff and faculty, and easily process it. Information quickly goes to the right people for signoff to get things going."

The results

With Process Director playing a major role in easing the transition to remote operations, CSUS was able to:

• Move from paper to electronic forms and processes 
• Cut development time for electronic forms and back-end workflows by 50% 
• Obtain and easily process data from students, staff, and faculty 
• Deliver information quickly to the right people for sign-off 

The change in student experience has been remarkable. Going from PDF forms where every box had to be filled out by hand, to a system where student and course data is automatically pulled in from different systems into one mobile accessible form, immediately eliminated pain from the student experience. Ensuring that the student and enrollment services team can have visibility on where each process is step by step brings more value to the solution. 

“If this whole crisis had happened a year ago, we would have been scrambling to get systems available. But we’ve been building all sorts of processes in the last few years, and Process Director is now a large part of getting people online and have access to the resources they need remotely. So, we ended up preparing for this without even knowing it.”