How do you make your University compete with the times?
This report looks at the past, present, and future challenges institutes are trying to navigate as well as student insights from UCAS on why students...
93%
reduction in time to transfer records
100%
data accuracy
The Challenge
A few weeks before clearing, UEL approached Equantiis with an urgent need to automate their internal clearing process. They were rinsing through time manually transferring 1300 records from their internal system to UCAS, and this process takes around 20 minutes to complete per record.
That’s 435 hours of staff time for just one process.
So, during the peak of the clearing period, UEL would recruit temporary around 50 members of staff to help complete the work in time, and they needed to do it in a timely manner to ensure a positive student experience. They were also facing the challenges of the pandemic; working remotely without systems in place to support this, and extra temporary staff with no training.
What we did
Wasting no time, Equantiis were on board and analysing the process to understand where the challenges were and how we could improve it before jumping the gun and bringing in automation. However, after analysis, it was clear RPA was the solution.
Using Intelligent Automation, a software bot programmed to interact with core applications, was a fundamental steppingstone for UEL to start their automation journey. The technology showcased the true power of automation and how by automating one process had a ripple effect of positive outcomes for staff, students and partners such as UCAS.
By running a proof of concept Equantiis demonstrated how we could automate the process of transferring these records to UCAS unattended and once again save huge amounts of work and effort. When we say huge, we mean huge…
- Platform and RPA bot set up within 2 days
- 20:1 - Records taking a mere minute to get transferred instead of 20
- 100% data accuracy between systems
- 93% reduction in the time to transfer records
“No institute has ever completed the clearing process this quick before and it has paved the way for automating more parts of the student journey.”
– Rob Tucker, Head of Admissions
Long lasting results
The use of RPA to automate such a manual, time consuming process has brought results beyond what was expected. UEL recognised the potential of RPA and as a result, they have placed themselves in first place for completing the clearing process at a pace never seen before in the sector. Not only did they free up staff at a stressful, critical period, their admissions team won an award for their work which was largely due to the outcome of clearing.
“A key element of realising the University of East London’s Vision 2028 is the delivery of sustainable growth through business process optimisation. We approached Equantiis to collaborate on a proof of concept over the Clearing period in 2020 that would alleviate the need to manually process applications during this vitally important recruitment period for the University." - Donald McLeod
"We worked in partnership to review our current processes and Equantiis developed a robot in just over a week that reduced the time to process an application down to 1 minute without human intervention. The robot delivered has helped us deliver efficiency saving, enhanced customer service to our applicants and freed up our staff to focus on value added customer engagement activity."
Donald McLeodActing Director of Change and Transformation
Higher Education Success Story
Building and Delivering a Transformation Strategy
Our team of 15 worked tirelessly on-site to identify what exactly MMU students desired.
