A leading university research center uses Bonita to accelerate application development

Less time for development, with more simplicity, flexibility and efficiency for application users.

Summary

With 5 centuries of history, this leading university & research center  is a large establishment which brings together 45 teaching components (faculties, schools and institutes) and some sixty laboratories. These are spread over 54 sites located in four departments, which welcome 60,000 students and 7,000 staff, including 4,000 teachers and 3,000 administrative and technical employees. This teaching and reseaarch institution offers comprehensive coverage in science, health, technology, engineering, human and social sciences, law, economics, management, arts, letters and languages, as well as bridges among establishments and disciplines which allow students flexibility in study. It relies on a network of partner universities also located in the heart of Europe, as well as in the world, and has earned its place of influence through the internationalization of its training and the mobility of its researchers, teachers and students.

About the Bonita implementation

"Under the leadership of our Digital Commission, which defines priorities according to the needs identified within our different entities, our mission is based on the development, installation and operation of new business and management applications. To do this, and in accordance with ministerial directives which encourage us to do more and more online, we are always looking for new tools. We discovered the Bonita platform in 2014, when we were looking for a tool capable of speeding up and automating our processes, rather than having to rewrite our applications from start to finish. Our goal was to save time in terms of development, while offering more simplicity, flexibility and efficiency to the different users involved throughout the processes associated with an application."

Digital Director, Study and Development Information System Sub-department, in charge of dematerialization and responsible for the operations team

Objective

This university's IT team needed to:

• Save time during the development and implementation of new applications
• Accelerate the process of paperless applications, both in terms of HR and education
• Automate business processes, especially for use cases that require a validation process (subject to different levels and with multiple interlocutors), then notification
• Develop and streamline collaboration between the different populations involved throughout a process, for greater efficiency
• Secure the validation steps from end-to-end
• Focus on the value of real-time (immediacy) in our work for all populations we serve (internal and external), and dedicate our efforts to dematerialization and digital transformation

Challenges

Speeding up and automating  processes, without having to rewrite applications from start to finish

Outcomes

21,000 cases have been treated since the deployment of the platform in 2015, while one and a half people work full time for its development and administration. The different applications deployed and processed from the platform involve two areas:

Human Resources

• Local IT specialists can request to create an email address for people who do not get one by default (eg temporary workers)
• People outside the university (interns, temporary workers, etc.) can submit a request for files which must be validated by the HR department online to be hosted online
• Staff can correct their own HR data within the system, via an automated process, for better reliability

Education

• Students can submit an online request to register for a training course, followed by validation by the manager and an automatic registration process
• Training managers can request the creation of an online student learning booklet, allowing all parties involved in the student's educational path (teachers, companies, administrative services, student) to work together and exchange documents throughout the student’s educational path
• Those responsible for diplomas (undergraduate and graduate) and the Training Department can automatically and regularly validate and update the descriptive sheets relating to the 551 total training courses available

Benefits

• New processes can be deployed faster, saving development time
• Improved performance at all levels: deadlines, management, compliance, delivery
• Better end-to-end security
• Real-time, easy exchanges between the many user populations inside and outside the University

"The  platform engine is completely reliable and this allows the process to be developed with confidence. Online processes are at the heart of many higher education institutions. We plan to continue to develop our project with Bonita to improve efficiency and collaboration between all our stakeholders, and provide better service to our teachers, researchers, partners and students.​​​​"

Digital Director, in charge of dematerialization and responsible for the operations team