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How to Elevate Digital Process in the Registrar's Office

November 24, 2020

The Registrar’s Office is brimming with forms. Offering those forms and processes in a digital format is beneficial for students, staff, and faculty; however, during a global pandemic, it is absolutely essential. While offering a paper-based or PDF process is a good first step, it is not a long term solution to providing efficient and secure experiences for students or faculty and staff. 

The Cost of Paper on Your Campus

Paper may cost more than you realize. For example, let’s look at the change of major process. Institutions may see up to 10% of their student body change their major annually. 

The Cost of Paper

The average cost of managing and processing one paper form is $3.63. Multiply this by 1,000 students changing their major each year. This process alone costs $3,630. Think of how many processes across campus use paper.

True cost of paper infographic 1

The Cost of PDFs

Your institution may use PDFs instead. PDFs too may cost more than you realize. It costs $2.84 to manually process one PDF due to lack of integration. It costs $180 per user annually to use Adobe Acrobat Pro. Plus, 65% of PDFs are printed. 

True cost of paper infographic 2

Automating Processes with Kuali Build

Kuali Build, a forms and workflow platform, can help you take the next step in offering a better and more resourceful experience. This no-code, cloud-based solution gives you the power to think creatively about any student-facing process like change of major, withdrawing from a course, requesting a parking pass, etc. It is easy (and fun!) to use and offers powerful integrations, hierarchy support, and is priced for higher education. Additionally, Kuali Build’s customers are enthusiastic about the product. 

“[Kuali] Build makes it easy to automate forms and approval steps.” Lyndi Duff, Director, Curriculum Administration, University of Utah
“As soon as we saw Kuali Build, we knew we had found what we were looking for - something that could solve for 90% of our low code use cases, while being completely accessible to our end users.” JD Mills, Manager, Digital Transformation, Davidson College

Steps to Automate Processes 

Automating processes can sound complicated. Below, we’ll break it down for you using the program change process. 

  1. Build Your Form

Build your form within Kuali Build’s drag-and-drop form builder. Use field types from simple to complex, such as long text, multiple choice, checkboxes, and dropdown menu. Use field validation for information fields such as email, phone number, or date to ensure the student inputs the correct information. 

  1. Add Integrations

Students don’t always have all the information they need readily available. Additionally, students might make clerical mistakes such as typos or inputting “history department” instead of “Department of History.” 

Using smart gadgets, you can use data lookups to connect to data sources within your campus. Easily link fields to other data sources like name, advisor, student ID, programs available, and more. Additionally, you can do all of this without coding experience.

  1. Design Your Workflow

With role-based routing, you can use the integrated organizational hierarchy information to assign the student’s advisor, dean, and others without knowing names or emails. 

Use various types of steps within the workflow such as approval, acknowledgement, or notification to provide the right level of oversight to each individual in the approval process. 

At the end of your workflow, add an integration step to automatically sync the student’s new major with other campus systems. 

Expert tip: We recognize  business processes are not the same across an entire institution. With Kuali Build, you can accommodate nuanced scenarios with branching workflows. 

  1. Simulate Your Workflow

Catch issues within your workflow before you publish it for campus-wide use. Using the simulate feature, you can see what each step of the workflow will look like for everyone involved.

  1. Publish

You’ve built and tested the form and workflow. It’s time to publish! 

After you’ve published your workflow, keep track of it using Kuali Build’s built-in reporting tool. With access to metadata, you can monitor where each form sits within the workflow, average time on step, time to completion, and more. Or, if your institution has a preferred data management tool, export the entire dataset and utilize it there. 

Kuali Build can help you create complex forms and powerful automated workflows for your institution. If you’d like to see the product or learn more about the steps to automate a process, watch the full demonstration here. Otherwise, check out how other Registrars are using Kuali Build to transform their processes! Click here to learn more.  

Sources

  1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/08/nearly-third-students-change-major-within-three-years-math-majors-most
  2. https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pricing.html
True Cost of Paper and PDFs on Campus Case Study
University of Victoria Case Study
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