Customer Story

The Organisation

New Zealand’s Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT) has provided the region with vocational training for over a century, supplying top tier education to thousands of students every year.

We spoke to Angela Scott, Information & Enrolments Manager of NMIT, who was happy to share her process improvement journey with Flowingly.

The Challenge

Organisations cannot consistently deliver for as long as NMIT have without having centrally accessible, simple, and engaging processes. NMIT recognised that although processes are key to their success, better visibility was needed on where processes were being held up. Automating processes with assigned steps, reminders and nudges, is a failsafe method for overcoming some of their process challenges.

NMIT staff are encouraged and empowered to innovate and find opportunities for improvement. Responsible for the applications and enrolments for the Institute, Angela oversees the processing of large amounts of information. Angela made waves at NMIT after successfully managing a process improvement project allowing applications to progress to enrolments in five days or fewer. This process is arguably the most crucial process for education, similar to a sales conversion process in other industries.

Visibility also became a challenge as the business scaled, with people struggling to understand what stage a process was at and if they needed to action anything.

“Staff couldn’t self-serve to know where a process is at. So, the number of tickets we had requesting updates was getting more than the actual number of requests coming through. There were just so many requests there that it was just clogging up systems.”

“We were in a situation where we had both visibility and efficiency issues over a number of processes.

This meant that:

1. There was a lack of clarity and responsibility of each step of the process.
2. Processing delays impacts the student and the organisation.”

NMIT had previously trialed Flowingly in another department, who recommended it to Angela. After creating her first Flow in under an hour with no training, she hasn’t looked back.

The Solution

Angela and the team at NMIT are now working to eliminate paper-based processes, and all of their associated issues. Not only did NMIT want to improve their process completion times, they wanted to increase interdepartmental collaboration and reduce their environmental footprint.

Using Flowingly’s Process Mapping, they provide a centralised and easy to use web-based system for staff to access and reference processes. NMIT are now able to deploy minor tweaks and even entire processes to their staff in real-time.

Two areas which have undergone significant improvements under Flowingly have been their Course/Programme Cancellations and Student Cancellation/Withdrawal processes.

“Automating our processes in Flowingly has really allowed everyone to see what is required to complete a particular process, for example a student cancellation/withdrawal.”

Spanning the Enrolments, Curriculum Areas, and Finance teams, these processes had issues around approvals sitting unattended and various steps of the process being unclear.

This is where Flowingly’s Workflow Automation came in. By automating these processes in Flowingly, everyone is now able to see where the process is sitting in real-time. This has reduced the required admin and follow-up that they were previously undertaking, while also allowing them to easily identify bottlenecks within their processes.

The Results

As a result of these improvements, NMIT have had the following results:

• Process bottlenecks have been reduced. Approvals and tasks are now completed on schedule, and hold-ups are identified in real time.
• Visibility has increased across the organisation, with clarity on both process structure and real-time progress.
• Process and step ownership have increased, meaning each team is aware of what is expected of them.
• They are seeing a more consistent end result.
• Having a central system of record has increased their audit trail, meaning that audits are now passed with ease.
• Paper waste has reduced.

In an environment where compliance, reporting, and governance requirements are high, Flowingly provides NMIT with an excellent toolset to help meet their obligations.

NMIT has already seen huge process improvements through both the use of Flowingly and the dedication of their staff. As time elapses, NMIT are committed to creating and automating processes that a multinational corporate would be proud of.

Advice

We asked Angela if she had any advice for other education providers.

“The manager/user of the process is the best person to write the Flow as they will also take this opportunity to improve the process, not replicate what is currently happening.”

Angela is confident that NMIT will continue to see success on their process improvement journey.

“As others see the benefit of using Flowingly across the organisation, other departments will also take the opportunity to use Flowingly for their processes, for example: Academic and Quality Team – Policies and Procedures Sign-Off, Curriculum Team – NMIT Employee Internal Professional Development Approval.”