Business Challenge:

The University of Portland (UP) has made a concerted effort to transition paper-based processes online to streamline workflows and reduce labor related costs. Central to this effort is the University’s use of web forms and web applications to empower the whole gamut of their community, including students, faculty, and administrators.

Traditionally, the University tasked its IT and web services department to custom build web forms, applications and reports on a request basis. This process proved cumbersome and limited the IT department’s ability to focus on creating new, innovative projects that could benefit the greater community.

Faced with an incredible amount of data collection needs, it was difficult for the IT Department to keep up with the web form and web application needs of the campus community. UP needed to find a no-code solution that could decentralize the application development process, enabling the entire campus community to build, create and deploy their own web forms, applications and reports. Because of the non-technical background of its user community, the solution needed to be intuitive and easy to use, as well as providing a breadth of functionality to address the multitude of applications, from simple to complex requirements, needed to meet the needs of this diverse audience.

PerfectApps’ Solution:

Jenny Walsh, Director, Office of Web & Administrative Systems for University of Portland, chose PerfectApps because of the product’s extensive functionality, affordability and ease of use. UP was able to deploy PerfectApps to serve the data collection and workflow process needs of their entire campus community, including student groups, faculty, administrative users and more.

Since deployment, the UP community has created hundreds of web forms, web applications and reports to streamline both simple and complex tasks, freeing up IT resources to focus on more comprehensive projects. UP students, staff and faculty use no-code solutions built with PerfectApps to manage tasks such as student, faulty and dean evaluations, nominations for awards, and event registration, as well as to create a multitude of surveys to collect critical data and feedback, including those for incoming freshman, graduating students, faculty and various academic groups on campus.

In addition, UP was able to develop an innovative solution to help streamline the ability to securely collect funds and payments across campus. By integrating PerfectApps with PayPal, UP was able to create online payment forms to collect event registration payments, donations, and sell University paraphernalia online. PerfectApps made application development easy for users across the campus, eliminating time consuming paper-based processes and freeing up valuable IT and Web Services Group resources. Because PerfectApps doesn’t require coding skills, UP was able to empower their campus community to meet their own needs with limited guidance. As a result, the University was able to streamline operations and realize significant value in many areas, including:

• Empowering less technical users to meet their own application development needs, which reduced the workload for the IT Department

• Reducing the amount of time the administrative staff spent on data entry and report creation

• Streamlining the ability to collect donations and payments through an integration with PayPal, which made fund collection easier to record and track

• Providing a pathway for centralized data collection, which enabled users to view reports and manipulate data for workflow process improvements.

“The use of PerfectApps campus wide has been amazing. Because PerfectApps is so easy to use and can address almost any web application development challenge our users are faced with,
the product is in continual use.”

Jenny Walsh

Director

Office of Web & Administrative Systems for University of Portland