California Institute of Integral Studies

Challenge

Decrease time and effort involved in manual workflow processes

Results

• Automating workflows save time and money
• By integrating systems, users only enter information one time
• Selected a vendor that understands higher ed processes and has a breadth of solutions

Summary

We have workflows. A workflow is a student says, well, I want to apply to your university. And so what happens? They go online. They fill out a form. That form gets processed in a system, and people see that we have this new record, this new application. And so that kicks off other activity.

By moving to Colleague, especially because Ellucian is strictly focused on universities, they have thought through many of these processes. And so we're going to be able to capture the efficiencies from those. If you think about every action that a staff member takes in terms of interacting with records or a student takes interacting or a faculty member takes interacting with records, if they can cut out some of those middle pieces by the software just simply processing and doing the normal workflow automatically, you realize snippets of savings. When you multiply that by thousands and millions, you see that the efficiencies really grow.

One of the most important things that we were looking for was a software company that had a large breadth of solutions, so that we could integrate all the solutions that we have on campus. And the second most important thing was the fact that Ellucian does their own implementations. Many of the other companies out there offload their implementations. And we felt that that was something that was really important for us.

When you have an integrated system where a student comes in, they apply, they don't have to put that data in again, that data flows to the student information system. But that data also flows to the financial aid group. It flows to the finance office. It flows later to the programs that they apply to. Ellucian has a wonderful suite of those solutions.