Kate Cross (seated left) and Bridgitt Ayers (seated right) with IT’s Brian Cole and Omer Piperdi (standing, left to right).
“Boxes and piles of paper everywhere!” Bridgitt Ayers is describing her office in 2012, when graduate student requests could only be submitted through a paper-based process. “It was Kate’s brainchild, to become even more of a paperless office than we already were. All our files and documents were already being scanned and uploaded to OnBase [Rice’s document imaging and workflow solution]; and we started to think about why we continued asking departments to send in paper that we were only going to scan and destroy.”
What the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) needed was a portal that students and department coordinators could use to submit their requests. “Since we don’t have electronic signatures, the form can be completed electronically but has to be printed in the department so they can sign it. Then they scan the signed form and send it to us using their portal,” Ayers explained. “The department coordinator just enters the student’s ID number and an auto-load from Banner fills in details from the student record, then the coordinator attaches the scanned form, answers a few specific questions about that type of request, and submits it to us. But the best part about the new system is the receipt the coordinator gets when they submit a request.”
Receipts are important because department coordinators previously had to rely on confidential paper documents traveling through the campus mail system, or as an email attachment as a last resort in a crisis. According to Ayers,“The new process is much more secure and it also assures you that your form has been submitted – the coordinator gets an email as soon as the form is sent through the portal to GPS.” The secure GPS Requests portal, available only to department coordinators and faculty or staff involved in processing graduate student requests, moves the electronic copy of the form directly into a GPS processing queue in OnBase, bypassing the earlier stacks of paper email message collection points.
The project started in October 2012 when the GPS staff reviewed their current process. “The answer was to find a smarter way to do things,” recalled Kate Cross, Assistant Dean for GPS. “We were already using an OnBase filing cabinet to store the scanned documents, and we knew from OnBase information sessions that workflows might be the answer to our needs. “
Andrea Martin led the IT OnBase team of Brian Cole, Omer Piperdi, and Eddie Heard, and they worked with Ayers and Cross to outline a workflow, a receipt process, and a check list for each of the 15 petitions or forms. The team also worked closely with Luigi Bai in Administrative Systems to develop an auto-load based on Banner data. Over the next twelve months, the IT and GPS teams worked together to build out the application. The workflow was developed, tested, refined and implemented for all graduate program departments.
In a nutshell, department coordinators now receive receipts when they submit forms and the process is faster and more efficient.