Streamline workflows in higher education

When it comes to managing workflows in higher education, accuracy, accountability, and user experience are critical. Educational institutions deal with a tremendous amount of paperwork and requests that must be managed daily. By automating the workflow around things like hiring, grant proposals, vendor management, capital and operational expenditures, managing approvals, and operations requests, paper and manual processes disappear, leaving a more efficient and productive organization in its place.

Higher education needs a cost-effective solution that allows for both creation and reuse of customized, automated processes that can:

• Eliminate redundancies and consolidate student and staff services into a single portal.

• Provide a better student self-service experience.

• Limit or completely replace manual and paper-based processes for student and staff.

• Centralize and streamline 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.

Improve the student experience

With workflow automation, you can streamline workflows for critical, student-facing departments like financial aid, admissions, registration, and academic records. For instance, are there ways your financial aid office could better communicate with your admissions office on scholarship availability or your payroll office on student work-study funding?

Students today expect their interactions with the university to be on a par with their favorite online tools for social media, eCommerce, and research. Are you providing these kinds of experiences? Some ways to help include:

• Providing your students with a centralized, user-friendly portal to submit requests and provide information.

• Replacing slow, manual processes with automated workflows so you can move students through their processes faster, improving their onboarding experience.

• Providing smart, dynamic forms that work just as well on students’ phones and tablets as they do on a full-size monitor.

• Integrating captured student data with existing university systems to reduce data entry and reentry.

Improve the administrative experience

University administration and support staff spend too much time dealing with manual processes like paper, emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems.

Today, innovative universities are replacing all these manual processes with smarter, automated tools that give administrative teams better results in less time.

Workflow automation reduces clicks, phone calls, emails, and data entry.

• Instead of a long email thread, click an approval button.

• Instead of lengthy back and forth with team members, assign work to the appropriate person based on university rules or dynamic data.

• Instead of manual data entry errors, move data automatically between systems with workflow integration.

Case study: Baylor University

Pete Able Manager of HR and Financial Systems

“For all the users on this campus, even those initially resistant to change, they can now see where their request is, rather than just think it’s a piece of paper laying on someone’s desk somewhere.”

Baylor University

With more than 12,000 enrolled undergraduates and hundreds of academic and administrative professionals to support, Baylor University operates under a centralized IT office that services its users on the main campus as well as satellite locations.

With Nutrient Workflow, Baylor was able to simplify — and in some cases reduce — the need for human data entry, saving time and minimizing the potential for mistakes.

Nutrient is highly customizable and system agnostic

Every higher education institution maintains a portfolio of applications for managing diverse and critical information. This portfolio may include solutions for accounting, CRM, MRM, SIS, ERP, etc. While these applications can all perform admirably on their own, there’s always work and information that needs to pass among multiple departments and/or systems. There are internal processes that are platform agnostic and, instead, look at the university itself as the platform.

Implementing a workflow automation system that can talk to these existing applications and pass information between them ensures bottlenecks between enterprise systems don’t stymie processes. Nutrient can be the “glue” that holds your disparate systems together.

Use case example: Education assistance requests

Using this process, students can request tuition assistance from the university. The process includes approvals, mentor selection, a tuition form, and a subprocess for the bursar’s office.

Workflow examples

What can educational institutions automate with Nutrient? Here’s a small list of examples:

• Budget request approvals

• Class schedule approvals

• Curriculum peer reviews

• Faculty travel requests

• Financial aid requests

• Grant proposal processes

• Internship applications

• Payment/financial disbursement requests

• Recruiting authorizations

• Staff and faculty onboarding

• Student registration

• Transcript requests

• Vendor approvals