Workflow for Higher Education

In higher ed, when it comes to managing workflows, 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, operations requests, etc. paper, and manual processes disappear, leaving behind a more efficient and productive organization in its place.

Higher Education needs a cost-effective solution that allows for both creation and re-use 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 workflow in 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, e-commerce, and research. Are you providing these kinds of experiences currently?

By providing your students with a centralized, user-friendly portal to submit requests and provide information, while providing administrative staff with powerful, rule-based workflow and request handling tools, you can ensure efficiency, accuracy and promote a better student experience.

By replacing slow, manual processes with the automated workflow you can move students through their processes faster , improving their experience and earning more revenue for the school.

Case Study: Baylor University

Customer Quote

“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.”

– Pete Able, Manager of Human Resources and Financial Systems at Baylor University

With more than 12,000 enrolled undergraduates and hundreds of academic and administrative professionals to support, Baylor 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 reducing the potential for mistakes. 

Read the Full Case Study

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 sub-process for the Bursar’s office.

Nutrient Workflow 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 is 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 that processes aren’t stymied by bottlenecks between enterprise systems. Nutrient Workflow can be the “glue” that holds your disparate systems together.

Watch our 2-Minute Demo

Workflow Examples

What can educational institutions automate with Nutrient Workflow? Here is 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

Download our free “Workflow Automation Guide”

Learn more about how workflow automation can help remove process bottlenecks and streamline your organization.