St. John's University

Challenge

St. John's aims to modernize how they present information (tasks) and collect data from students and employees.

Results

• Improve student and employee experience.
• Increase productivity.
• Save time for IT to become more strategic.

Ellucian is changing the face of higher education technology with Ellucian Intelligent Processes, a no-code solution for bulk task assignments, account holds, workflows, and other processes. St. John's University in Queens, NY, is adopting Intelligent Processes and sees a lot of value in Ellucian's game-changing solution. Associate Vice President of Business Process and Enterprise Applications, Maura Woods, explained how the school went through its modernization journey. As they migrate to SaaS, the school is both evaluating and lightening its load of customizations they've made over the last 25 years.

"Intelligent Processes with its no-code features is making it very easy for us to modernize the whole experience of presenting [tasks] while collecting data from students and employees," Woods said.

Creating new workflows will also help with HR onboarding and offboarding tasks. Creating straightforward, easy-to-follow checklists with critical actions will significantly improve the employee experience. St. John's originally started with simple tasks like ensuring new employees sign a wage acknowledgment form.

"Intelligent Processes is a big time-saver and simplifies the process for students and staff. It can present you with your information and ask, 'Have you acknowledged that you’ve read it and accepted it?'" she said. "There are many things on the student side that are similar to that; Intelligent Processes will help us meet that need."

It also improves the student experience by shifting the focus from holds to driving tasks. Students don't want to think about holds — they want to register, have money to pay the bills, and be ready for class. This technology changes how students interact with the institution by focusing on outcomes.

Making the Entire Institution Successful

Associate Director of Administrative Applications, Nikhil Philip and Associate Director of Process Improvement, Julie Gindi were also quick to praise Intelligent Processes. Philip said, "The foundation is very empowering. It's a no-code solution where users can start building workflows on their own without worrying about writing any code and can positively impact the experience for students, faculty, and staff."

They saw a live demo of Intelligent Processes at Ellucian's eLive conference in 2023 and what he witnessed piqued his — and countless other Ellucian customers' — interest. Its ease of use for less tech-savvy users played a big role in the decision.

"Intelligent Processes is going to increase our productivity significantly. I like that we can give a business analyst or non-technical user on my team, who's not a developer, the opportunity to build a workflow, improve a process, and simplify it. Then, they can partner with a technical person to build the Data Connect APIs, that's HUGE!" Gindi said.

Woods agreed. When it comes to composing forms, automating tasks, and building approval workflows in Intelligent Processes, she said delegating much of the "front-end work" to business admins will save her team valuable time and resources. Until now, they've had to handle the full workload themselves.

Gindi emphasized, "The school's move to SaaS aims to cultivate greater autonomy within the business units at St. John's, lessening their need for extensive IT support. This opens time for the IT team, so we can focus on the next big thing."

Building Better Processes

Woods, Philip, and Gindi are all already working with Intelligent Processes to simplify the lives of the IT team and bolster student success. For example, before a student pays their bill at the beginning of every semester, the student must fill out a Student Financial Responsibility Agreement and confirm their bill. St. John's staff utilizes Intelligent Processes and Ellucian Experience to automate tasks while streamlining the process.

Philip shared, "SaaS setup was seamless, once we got access without any setup required, we just gave permissions and started using the product right away. One quick win was that it is now very easy for us to have all students accept financial responsibility before they start a term."

Intelligent Processes' user-friendly interface and experience encouraged St. John's staff to plan several other ambitious projects, of collecting critical information from both students and employees and updating the Banner database.

"It's going to help us better engage our constituents and make sure they take action," Woods said. "Intelligent Processes enables us to present tasks to our end-users organized in the way they need to complete them; it nudges them and is presented every time they log in."

Lightening the Load for Higher Ed Institutions

Ellucian empowers customers with intuitive solutions for solving real-world problems, and Intelligent Processes is no exception.

Gindi shared, "Intelligent Processes is a critical solution that will increase efficiency for the university. It's also giving us new ideas as we re-architect business processes, which will ultimately help the institution better support students and achieve its goals."

Moreover, St. John's staff appreciated Ellucian's support for them every single step of the way to realizing the full potential of Intelligent Processes.

"Ellucian has been a great partner as we adopted Intelligent Processes. We gave a lot of feedback at the early stages and see that Ellucian is invested in listening to us and building the best possible product for higher education," Woods said.

Evolving Past Customizations

Intelligent Processes' broad range of capabilities will allow users to move past time and labor-consuming customizations they've needed to build in the past for other software. This bold leap forward will save higher education institutions resources and money.

"We're getting away from our PL/SQL processes that were custom," Woods said. "We also have a lot of scripts that do a lot of automation because we're such a large school. Intelligent Processes is going to help us sunset those customizations and provide a modern SaaS way of doing them.

That's where the difference will be. We get rid of this technical debt and these scripts you must maintain, and you put it into a tool that people understand."

Title IV authorization, confidentiality agreements for onboarding, and final high school transcripts and vaccination records for new students are all examples of processes that needed customizations within St. John's software. SaaS moves beyond customizations and Intelligent Processes is here to help.

"This gives us a huge opportunity to look at all of the technical debt collected over 25+ years and de-customize it in a modern SaaS safe way without re-engineering; A must-have for any customer moving to SaaS," Woods said.

St. John's is set up for success with Ellucian Intelligent Processes and they couldn't be more excited to continue their journey with it in the years to come. The institution sees many possibilities for it with significant benefits in the future.