The business procedures in place in education are similar to any other type of organization. There are forms, processes, workflows, and data that people work with every day. Just like businesses in any other industry, those in higher education stand to benefit a great deal from streamlining and automating the different business processes and workflows for their institutions. When you think about all of the different aspects of running an institution of higher education, the need for a workflow automation solution becomes rather apparent. Higher education deals with students, true, but there are also processes built around areas such as:
- Maintenance
- Business offices
- Personnel
- Housing
- Scheduling
- Information technology
- Safety and security
- Applications
- Financing
- Public Safety
In each of these areas, the right business process solution can help build rules and workflows to make things more efficient and reduce human error.
Typical Pain Points
In many institutions of higher learning, silos are built up around the different departments. As a result, institutions often find themselves implementing multiple different solutions that handle the same task. These solutions, often designed for a single use case, are unable to work with the applications implemented by different departments. Here you have the same data replicated across your institution, but it is not shared.
Incorrect Data with Multiple Means of Entry
This alone presents a number of issues. The first is that when there is no single source of truth, data is not kept up to date. If admissions updates a student’s record but student health, housing, or even academic advising is unaware of the change, it creates inefficiencies for the school and problems for the student. Now add the cost of storing the same data in multiple, disparate solutions. These are two major areas of concern that have serious negative impacts.
