Business process analysis at a large graduate school

Challenge

A large state graduate school with over 15,000 students was using multiple processes to submit, track, and approve student requests and submissions. The university wanted to improve business processes and establish system requirements to help determine next steps for finding a single system to meet their needs.

Solution

BerryDunn collaborated with stakeholders across the university to:

• Analyze university documentation to gain an understanding of their policies, procedures, organization, and environment
• Work with senior leadership, staff, IT groups, faculty, and students to document processes in their current state and to understand current systems in use
• Develop current-state process maps to identify pain points such as: duplication of effort, too many stopping points in a process, manual entry of data, multiple sources of information, and paper processes
• Provide an analysis of current environment and proposed future-state considerations
• Partner with stakeholders to develop future-state processes focused on eliminating pain points, automating workflow, and automating data entry into their student information system

Outcomes

As a result of this work, the university was able to:

• Eliminate 510 manual process steps
• Develop process-specific functional requirements for future system needs
• Help institutional leadership understand the value of a new system and next steps in the software development lifecycle