University Business - April 2012 - (Page 39)

spring Provost InformatIon technology offIce of the regIstrar HOnOrEEs 2012 Texas A&M University Rapid Adjustments T he idea of students substituting courses in a degree plan is not unheard of, but such requests must be carefully managed. Before the fall of 2011, Texas A&M University was dealing with the challenging and costly issue of processing undergraduate course adjustments within the Degree Audit office in the Office of the Registrar using a paper-based process. Requests were initiated by an advisor, then sent to the department head and dean before arriving at Degree Audit. The transition to a new student information system two years prior introduced significant changes to the entry process for adjustments, which led to a six-fold increase in the amount of time and effort required to process adjustments. Students appreciate that they can register at their convenience and now visit the offices in person only when necessary. The new system went live in March 2011 and has been embraced by students, who now visit the offices only when necessary, rather than just to move on to the next step. “Students can register at their convenience, even in their pajamas, some have bragged,” Jasper says. Instead of meeting with every student, advisors, and registrar and bursar’s office staff are freed to focus on the students who really need help. In addition, an estimated 5,000 pages of paper have been saved. Training and communication were important parts of the transition, Jasper says, along with reviewing the existing processes. “We discovered there are a lot of prerequisites and corequisites that were easy to override on paper,” she cautions. “Basically, we had to review all that; a lot of it was being overridden, so it didn’t make sense to have prerequisites and corequisites because they weren’t being enforced.” This removes another obstacle between a student and registering for class. —A.M. universitybusiness.com “We were receiving thousands of pieces of paper a day,” says Laura Heard, assistant registrar. Realizing a change had to be made, the Provost IT team worked closely with the Degree Audit office for six months to develop a custom solution within their SunGard Banner ERP system. “We would work for two to three weeks on a small portion of the software based on their requirements, then show them the portion we had completed,” explains Nilesh Patel, associate director of the Provost Information Technology office. “If it met their needs, we would move on to the next portion; otherwise, we’d make the changes.” Their collaborative and innovative efforts produced the webbased Undergraduate Adjustments System (UAS). Degree Audit used to have a steady backlog of adjustment requests that numbered into the thousands. Within two months of UAS going live, that team was able to eliminate the backlog and became current in entering adjustment requests for the first time in two years. With the old way of doing things, request processing could take up to a month, says Heard. “We can now process them within a week.” In addition to a faster turnaround time, Degree Audit is no longer flooded with phone calls because people can track the progress of their request online, freeing those staff for other tasks. “In the five months before UAS, it took 18 people, including 12 temp workers, in Degree Audit to complete 7,800 adjustments. Within two months after UAS, it took only three people (and no temps) to complete 3,700 adjustments with only a third of them received on paper. In stark contrast to before, this is a 616 percent increase in efficiency in terms of average adjustments completed per person per month,” relates Juan Garza, assistant vice president and director of the Provost Information Technology office. He was told it takes 15 minutes to complete a request using the new electronic system, compared to 65 minutes under the old process. The Office of the Registrar estimates that the UAS saves the university $255,659 per year by eliminating temporary staffing costs ($75,000), reducing printing costs ($659), and paying fewer hourly wages ($180,000), due to less time spent on each step of adjustments workflow. The new system allows advisors to provide better service to students, as well. “One of my departments has 1,600 students with five full-time advisors,” says Timothy Scott, associate dean for Undergraduate Programs. “The student might see one advisor one time and a different one the next. Just keeping track of whether a request was submitted when it was paper was problematic.” With the paper-based system, there was also the risk of requests being lost along the way. Now anyone can do a name search and see what was submitted for the student. When embarking on a custom built solution, Garza advises having IT and the business entities work collaboratively on the project. Keeping in mind the new software has to suit the needs of the end user, not IT, will result in success for everyone. —A.M. April 2012 | 39 http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2012

University Business - April 2012
Editor’s Note
College Index
Ad Index
Behind the News
Financial Aid
Viewpoint
Independent Outlook
Models of Efficiency
Guns on Campus
Campus Finance
Internet Technology
End Note
Contents

University Business - April 2012