The University has a strategic objective to remove all paper from its administrative systems across its 35,000 students and 5,800 overall staff by 2018. Appian is enabling that transformation through its tight integration of process management, data management (via Appian Records) and native mobile device interface. All of the University's deployed and planned Appian applications leverage Appian's unique SAIL architecture and interface flexibility to provide a custom-branded, consistent and fit-for-purpose user experience across web and mobile devices through a single development effort.
"We want all of our IT systems and business processes to be faster, simpler and more engaging for all of our end-users, be they professional staff, academics, or students," continued Dalwood. "Appian's cloud platform is allowing us to drive that comprehensive transformation."
The University's first Appian deployment was for a variety of processes related to their Casual Academic employees. The application shifted recruitment, contracting and on-going processes such as time-sheet submission and approval for these seasonal and part-time academics from paper onto online and mobile environments. The solution leverages Appian's interface flexibility -- specifically, the Appian Sites feature -- to expose forms and processes to these external end-users as custom-branded sites. The University engages roughly 4,000 of these casual staff every year. In the past, this created more than 600 paper documents every month -- all of which were then re-keyed into various IT systems.
The Appian application accelerated process completion times from days or weeks to mere minutes. It incorporates embedded video content, digital offer review and signing capabilities, and tailored orientation materials -- all within the custom-branded Appian Sites environment. Appian's low-code development approach then allowed aspects of the Casual Academic processes to be extended to all staff for things such as variations to employment conditions and allowance requests.
The University will soon release a redesigned travel request and approval process on Appian, making it more efficient for senior-level academics traveling for research or other university-related obligations, as well as for students booking travel for semesters abroad. The application integrates data from third-party organizations to provide a rich environment to make booking and arranging travel a one-stop shop. This includes integrating government data from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that provides warnings and other travel alerts, as well as data from the University's booking portal that allows users to reserve tickets and accommodations directly within the application.
