Workflow Automation for Higher Education
Toni Buffa
Ensuring accountability and accuracy at your institution should always be top of mind. With more and more universities digitizing their administrative, finance, and IT workflows, it’s time to implement workflow automation within your organization to maximize efficiency and productivity for staff and students.
The number of unsecured and manual, paper-based processes at many institutions warrants workflow automation in the higher education industry. It doesn’t matter if you are a community college, liberal arts college, state university, or private university – all will benefit from implementing workflow automation.
Workflows around hiring, grant approvals, admissions, capital expenditures, etc., are managed daily throughout departments in the higher education industry. Automating these workflows, especially those primarily handled manually by employees, significantly improves efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. Let’s cover some main reasons the higher education industry would benefit from digitally transforming its workflows.
Reasons Higher Education Needs Workflow Automation
Improve the Student Experience
Your university has various front-facing student departments like Financial Aid, Admissions, Registration, and Academic Records. Could your financial aid office better communicate with your admissions office on scholarship availability or your payroll office on student work-study funding?
Students today expect their experience with the university to be seamless across all processes. Let’s use the student onboarding experience, for example. Student onboarding is a method for familiarizing students with the institution or university, the requirements needed to be met, the processes they may use throughout their time at the institution, and overall, provides an organized and better student experience. Automated workflows can move students through operations faster, improving their onboarding experience.
Improve the Administrative Experience
Your staff and administration should spend less time dealing with manual processes by utilizing workflow automation; approaches that use paper, emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems waste time. Did you know employees waste around 40% of their time on such tasks?
The digital transformation has already begun at various universities. Replacing manual processes with workflow automation tools gives admin teams better results in less time. This speeds up processing time and will improve your employee’s job satisfaction.
Lengthy back-and-forth email chains can be reduced to just a click of an “Approve” button, manual data entry errors are no more, and data can move automatically between systems with integration capabilities. Let your staff work on tasks that matter, not lengthy manual, error-prone tasks.
Baylor University Case Study
In 2007 Baylor University set out to find an automation solution to replace paper-based processes, streamline the review and approval process for requests, and then track these requests that needed to route between multiple different departments. Baylor selected Nutrient Workflow as the perfect solution to their needs.
Baylor rolled out Nutrient Workflow campus-wise with the name “BearQuest.” Over time there has been nothing but success for Baylor University. Up to 400 departments are now using Nutrient Workflow, more than 3,000 faculty and staff members are designated users of the system, and thousands of requests flow each month. Baylor has far from exhausted its opportunities with the system. Read their entire case study on our website for even more details.
Use Case Example
Student Facing: Education Assistance Request
Using this Education Assistance Request process, students can request tuition assistance from the university.
Form
Process
Administration Facing: Vendor Invoice Approval & Payment Process
This Vendor Invoice process will help simplify your invoice approvals from the original request to the payment being sent. This process allows for full invoice transparency of accounts payable workflow throughout the organization and can be used for multi-level reviews and approvals.
Form
Process
Workflow Examples
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Class schedule approvals
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Financial aid requests
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Student Registration
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Transcript requests
Every institution is different, but one thing is true for all: workflow automation can significantly improve operations across the board. The journey of digital transformation doesn’t have to be scary. Let Nutrient Workflow help your higher education administration thrive with automation. Request a live, personalized demonstration, or watch our 2-minute video for more information.
Watch Our 2-Minute Demo
Toni Buffa
Toni is a member of the Nutrient Workflow marketing team and writes for the Nutrient Workflow blog. Toni lives in Colorado and loves animals of all stripes.
