Colleges and universities all over the world are facing a number of unprecedented challenges including declining enrollment, decreased funding and evolving student expectations. In order to achieve the proverbial “more with less” as well as reinvent higher education for an increasingly interconnected, digital first environment, institutions of higher learning are embracing automation and next generation digital technology. Here is an up-close look at how. 

The University of Melbourne 

Students of today expect their interactions with universities to be just as fast and seamless as the other services they consume (i.e. Uber, Amazon, GrubHub). Realizing this, the University of Melbourne, one of Australia’s oldest and most established universities, set out to overhaul its administrative processes using robotic process automation (RPA).

To start, they focused on the application process, a mult-step process that required manual data entry and the processing of multiple documents (i.e. application forms, referrals, essays, transcripts, etc.). However, using Automation Anywhere’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the university was able to automate the entire process. In addition, administrators no longer have to navigate numerous excel spreadsheets when assessing student information. It’s all automatically extracted and stored in once central system.

And that was only the beginning. Over the next few years, the university was able to automate an additional 50 processes, saving an estimated 10,000 hours of manual labor and $7 million dollars in overhead costs. 

Last but certainly not least, in 2021 during the height of the global pandemic university leaders realized they had another crisis to contend with. In the wake of lock-downs and economic upheaval, many of its students were experiencing financial hardship. To help ensure its students could remain enrolled, the university launched a new needs-based COVID-19 Emergency Support Fund.

As vital as this program was, it also required the university to set up and scale a system capable of processing thousands of grant applications and their accompanying payments every two weeks in an incredibly short time. To accomplish this, the university developed modular bots based on previous automation requests. Leveraging this modular, low code approach to RPA, they were able to build new automations in under two days. 

As a result of the project, Melbourne University was able to save 4,500 of processing time and increase the number of payments processed by 300% in just two weeks.

University of Staffordshire

In 2019, the University of Staffordshire became the UK’s first university to launch a digital assistant for its students.  Hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, Beacon was designed to help students more effectively navigate their daily lives at school, support their learning, recommend activities and groups, and even provide mental health check ins. The goal is to not only ease new students into university life, but also support them academically and emotionally by providing digital “nudges” pointing them to the right direction whether that be requesting additional help with learning, various administrative tasks or joining a social club. 

In its first week alone, Beacon responded to over 10,000 queries and by the end of its first month, it had completed more than 2,500 day-to-day tasks. 

University of Auckland

In partnership with UiPath and PwC, the University of Auckland has successfully leveraged RPA to transform numerous back-office and student-facing processes. As a result, the university estimates they saved over 28,000 hours a year.  Amongst other tasks, the university has successfully automated:  

• student transcript requests
• compliance checks
• its purchase order system

One especially notable area of success was the application of RPA to automate supplier setup, an endeavor that successfully reduced turnaround time from 12 days to 2-14. 

Virginia Commonwealth University

In an effort to reinvent themselves for a new, digital-first era, Virginia Commonwealth University launched its end-to-end automation initiative in 2021. The goal of this project? To automate every process that could be automated. 

Similar to the University of Melbourne, VCU embraced a modular approach to RPA. With the help of solution providers WonderBotz and Uipath they developed bots using reusable components that could easily be repurposed for other processes. In fact, those involved with the project estimate that this modular approach has cut time to production by 73%. 

One of the first processes they tackled was the grant creation processes, a process that involved numerous manual and repetitive tasks. Using VCU’s modular RPA framework, they were able to quickly build automations that ultimately doubled the university’s grant processing capacity and boosted accuracy to 100%.

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