The Problem
Tulsa Community College (TCC) is a multi-campus institution, one that was heavily dependent on paper applications and request forms. Before they turned to ProcessMaker, their staff struggled with timely approvals. Their paper forms have to go from one campus to another for various sign-offs and permissions.
“[The staff] had to guess,” says Craig Cook, the college’s database administrator. “A recipient might be out of office when we sent forms, but you wouldn’t know it if you weren’t on that specific campus. Plus, we easily could’ve had a different person on another campus who would be able to approve the form.”
This caused its administrative workflows to become very tedious. The college’s processes were 100% manual, making paperwork a hassle and the approval process time-consuming.
The Solution
TCC was relying on an interoffice mail system that ran twice a day, meaning forms had a four to five hour delay at best. Tulsa’s multicampus organization, departments, faculty, and database administration needed a workflow solution strong enough to power its entire enterprise. With ProcessMaker, Tulsa could keep its existing solutions while taking advantage of the capabilities of its robust workflow platform. Best of all, ProcessMaker allowed Tulsa to seamlessly integrate its existing systems with the new platform to coordinate more movement across its workflows, a dynamic that is paramount to inter-departmental success.
“ProcessMaker is instant,” Craig says. “Now, notifications go straight to people’s phones. From an efficiency standpoint, ProcessMaker has greatly reduced our workload, decreased the time it took for approvals and feedback for documents, and it ended up being a perfect fit for us.”
ProcessMaker seamlessly integrates with TCC’s many systems, including:
- Finance
- Accounts Receivable
- Office of Advancement
- Human Resources
- Financial Aid
- Student Advisement
- Student Registration
The Value Created
Before implementing ProcessMaker, students had to take paperwork to different offices across campus and hunt down signatures. Today, the current graduation approval process is electronic and runs concurrently, allowing applications to be approved infinitely faster. In regard to the request process for system access, it was also entirely paper-based before ProcessMaker’s implementation. By the time IT finally received the request, the forms lacked necessary signatures or included incorrect information due to human error. Once TCC began using ProcessMaker, the pre-populated items have greatly reduced incorrect form information. One of the more important benefits is that TCC can take inputs to the ProcessMaker webforms and automatically pass them along to the requested system for access. With ProcessMaker, everything is entered on a single screen where pertinent Banner information has already been pre-populated. Information is then passed in the correct order from person to person until all signatures and necessary information are secured. For leave requests, staff were required to complete a paper form and send it to their supervisor, then to HR. Due to delays, employees had trouble determining their actual leave allowances. By using ProcessMaker, TCC employees can check their own leave balance and any pending leave requests.
Lastly, ProcessMaker has innovated the faculty’s processes at Tulsa’s student testing centers. Originally, an instructor manually completed information like course numbers and student IDs by hand. Since the centers didn’t have a way to communicate with one another, students changing test locations last minute would not allow instructors to retrieve necessary forms for testing. ProcessMaker has since then digitized all of the forms, so now exams can be pulled up anywhere, regardless of which testing center the student visits.
