Business Challenge:

Houston Community College (HCC) has made it a priority to transition paper-based processes online to streamline workflows and remove redundant business processes. Central to this effort is HCC’s use of web forms and workflow applications to eliminate the complicated, manually intensive workflows.

Traditionally, HCC has relied on paper-based processes to accomplish routine business tasks. As part of its effort to go paperless, HCC conducted an exhaustive audit and found that more than 200 paper-based forms were used to handle routine requests. The forms were symptomatic of the broader workflow challenges the college faced. Routine requests, such as budget adjustments and requests to transfer equipment from campus to campus, could take weeks to accomplish. The processes associated with filling out cumbersome paper forms, tracking down required signatories significantly hindered smooth operations.

HCC evaluated several web-based, no-code workflow management tools that would enable them to create automated workflows that would deliver significant time and cost savings. HCC needed a no-code solution that was intuitive and easy to use, as well as providing a breadth of functionality to address the multitude of business processes that required automation.

PerfectApps’ Solution:

Belinda Allison, Web Services Manager for Houston Community College, tested several technologies before deciding to use PerfectApps because of the product’s extensive functionality, affordability and ease of use.

Using PerfectApps, Allison was able to quickly digitize several forms and associated processes, including budget adjustment request forms used by executive management. Using PerfectApps’ custom solutions, significantly reduced the time required to process requests from origination to final approval. HCC automated the workflow around the processes, notifying the requestor of statuses in order to determine exactly where manual intervention was needed. Thus, expediting the processes and significantly decreasing time to approval.

In addition, Allison continued to leverage PerfectApps to automate additional workflows across campus. HCC completely integrated PerfectApps with its PeopleSoft application to streamline the workflow around hiring part-time faculty. The integration enables the college to populate hiring forms with demographic information from the HR application, as well as budget information from the financial application, streamlining the on-boarding process. Specific improvements included:

• Eliminating bottlenecks which prevented seamless business operations.

• Empowering users outside of IT to build solutions with a no-code application development approach.

• Reducing redundant data entry processes with integration with existing systems, like PeopleSoft, which enabled new hire forms to be populated with existing demographic and financial information.

“Digitizing our paper forms forced us to examine the business processes associated with each form.  PerfectApps enables us to automate our workflows, resulting in tremendous time and cost savings.”