It’s no secret that higher education is riddled with manual ways of working.
From back-office departments such as accounting to more front-end departments like financial aid, paper remains the communication and approval method for many colleges.
What happens when a college stays stuck on paper? Processes take a long time to approve and things can get lost in translation, costing a university thousands in lost profit.
By implementing a workflow solution specifically designed for larger enterprises, colleges can reduce administrative cost and improve operational efficiencies.
The result is a university environment that results in greater productivity among staff, more time back in its pockets to devote to strategy initiatives, and better workflows all around.
Since “customer” and “business” aren’t typical terms for higher education, the “customer” in this industry is the student. Workflow software can seriously increase the student experience by empowering the admin team to act on business processes more quickly.
Read on for three ways workflow software can improve your college’s administrative processes:
Eliminate waste and reduce costs by going paperless
The most obvious way that enterprise workflow software can improve admin work on the college level is by eliminating paper.
Nobody wants to spend hours typing, reviewing, signing, and waiting on approvals from other stakeholders anymore.
Data collection and data integration are often on paper, meaning data is sporadic and not standardized. This means data harder to collect, read, and use to speed up business processes like forms, approvals, and more.
With workflow software, data is collected and integrated on a central platform. The software also automates the whole process, making everything happen in real-time.
To reduce the amount of paper used in all of these processes, more and more colleges are recognizing the power of enterprise workflow software. By digitizing forms and creating a storage platform, the paper is eliminated completely.
Digital uploading allows for forms to be completed more easily via an electronic system. Creating a digital system allows increases security due to information verification. Student information is automatically uploaded into the document system, instead of being recorded manually.
All of this occurs without paper, effectively reducing excess waste. College then can deliver a greater student experience by servicing their students’ requests more quickly and efficiently in a way that mitigates cost and time to the college.
Bottom line: Going paperless eliminates time to complete tasks, reduces cost since everything is digital, and excess waste due to tons of paper being used.
(Sourced from Pexels)
Focus more on strategy and less on specifics, like deadlines
Colleges have a lot of areas that require process management. From uploading proper documentation to approval, many students are left waiting on the next word from their colleges while admins are overwhelmed with the never-ending stream of requests.
Whether in the back or front office, many departments are dealing with manual, outdated tech that results in missed deadlines, communication lags, and inefficient cross-campus collaboration that causes stress for students and faculty alike.
Luckily, workflow software solves these common issues felt on the administrative side. By implementing workflow software, colleges can focus more on the strategy of working better (known as business process management) and less on smaller details that can be automated.
Workflow software enables a college to assign tasks to specific people and identify areas of improvement in broken processes. It also creates a chronological way of working that makes sense for employees, speeding up the time it takes to complete each task.
Since workflow software automates and digitizes business processes, admins can use that data moving forward to create repeatable workflows for other functions. This creates a standardization yet comprehensive way of completing work across the entire college.
By getting the details covered with workflow software, universities can then focus on the strategy of reaching their goals, instead of wasting time on the day-to-day operations.
(Sourced from Pexels)
Encourage a culture of improvement among faculty
Colleges today spend a lot of energy on running their institutions as smoothly as possible.
More often than not, university faculty is robust, depending on the size of the college. The larger the university, the more people are employed to handle business processes daily. More people also means more room for error, especially if there is no centralized workflow process in place.
A college using workflow software is automating their documentation process, managing their daily operations with more efficiency, and working better together as a whole. With business process management in place, faculty develops an eye for broken processes.
Since workflow solutions increase productivity among staff and help faculty deliver better student experiences, the working environment experiences a positive facelift too.
Your staff will want to provide more feedback for improvement. Communication lines will be more often since there is increased visibility among faculty and departments. Cross-campus initiatives are now easier to execute thanks to process management.
It’s a lot more enjoyable to work as a unified unit when your college’s staff is on the same page. Workflow software makes this streamlined way of working reality in higher ed.
Are you ready to make your college run like a well-oiled machine?
With the right workflow solution, you can choose software that integrates easily with your current technology systems to automate the workflow process on the administrative side.
Tasks that are normally seen as repetitive, mundane, or that need to be replicated for multiple functions require a powerful software solution. Normally, this is handled by your college’s IT department, which is probably already backed up with service and support requests.
The good news is that options are available in the market that is easy-to-implement across your college requiring little to no-code. This means that your IT department will be able to use the process builder, but also your admin teams too.
Is your college looking for a workflow solution to streamline its administrative processes? Learn more about how our software solves these issues at www.processmaker.com.
About ProcessMaker:
ProcessMaker is a low-code business process management and workflow software. ProcessMaker makes it easy for business analysts to collaborate with IT to automate complex business processes connecting people and existing company systems. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina in the United States, ProcessMaker has a partner network spread across 35 countries on five continents. Hundreds of commercial customers, including many Fortune 100 companies, rely on ProcessMaker to digitally transform their core business processes enabling faster decision making, improved compliance, and better performance.
