The Problem
Colombia’s National University implemented ProcessMaker in its Human Resources Division in order to integrate business processes from 5 different areas in the University in a more agile and simple way. The National University of Colombia is a leader in higher education in Colombia with 8 branches, more than 45,000 students, and a significant staff of professors and administrative employees. Within the university there is a Human Resources which has the responsibility of managing everything related to human resources (teachers and staff) for the university. This division receives approximately 20 requests per day of different types such as employment certificates, absence requests, management reports, and processes related to the hiring and onboarding of new staff. Until 2009, the HR division managed these requests using printed documents and controlled them with Word documents and Spreadsheets; they had 5 offices and more than 30 people handling these documents at the same time causing the department to lose control of the requests, waste time looking for the physical documents, and they also received constant complaints from their clients (professors, administrative personnel, and external entities) that were unsatisfied with the response times associated with their requests.
- Activities that took a long time such as searching for physical documents and historical archives.
- Risks in the security and integrity of the information due to the number of participants playing a role in the process and the method of storage of the spreadsheets.
- Constant complaints from the clients due to the response times and accurate information concerning their requests.
- Ambiguous Information regarding the productivity of the division for the supervisors and office managers.
The Solution
At the end of 2009 the university initiated a project with Landsoft, S.A. in Medellin, Colombia with the objective of improving the HR processes in the university. After analyzing the processes of the 5 areas, it was decided that the university would begin by applying ProcessMaker to the processes of Request management, New Employee Hiring, and New Employee Onboarding; seeing the necessities of the HR division, it was also decided that the processes would be integrated with KnowledgeTree® in order to provide more advanced storage and version control of the documents that would be uploaded and generated during the workflow processes.
- Request Process: Both internal staff and university departments and external entities generate requests through ProcessMaker for such needs as vacation requests, employment certificates, sick day requests, absence requests, disciplinary processes and others. As part of the process numerous support forms and documents are generated such as official minutes, agreements, contracts, memorandums, automatic notifications, reports, and official resolutions. The generated documents are stored directly from ProcessMaker into KnowledgeTree®.
- New Employee Hiring and Onboarding Process for Admin Staff: The Hiring and Onboarding process allows the HR department to automate the process of hiring step by step from the time a vacancy is announced internally up until the new employee signs his/her contract and is officially on boarded at the university.
The Value Created
- Increased Control of the processes due to the fact that at all times all actors know the status of a request and who is assigned to attend to it.
- Increased Security and Integrity of the Information due to the fact that all users have separate and secure logins, and the system keeps a detailed log of all actions taken by each user in each case.
