Digitized and Automated a University Process with Robotic Process Automation

Abstract

Due to the changing student demographics and technological advances in research and teaching, both public and private higher education institutions offer services in an increasingly competitive environment. At the same time, the service quality expectations of the stakeholders continue to rise. For these reasons, technology solutions are needed for cost savings, efficiency gains, and improved service delivery. Like many other industries, higher education institutions have processes that can benefit from robotic process automation (RPA). RPA can be used to run student/staff jobs that manage back-office functions. It enables to ease the workload of their employees charged with doing these tasks and improve the user experience for students. This study examines an administrative process carried out at İzmir Bakırçay University. At least one administrative personnel assigned for the business process at the beginning of the research. The process consists of repetitive activities defined by specific rules. It was recommended to improve the process, considering the multitude of human errors and the length of the processing time. At the end of the study, the same process completed within 16 minutes for 240 students without making mistakes. Moreover, 75% of personnel needs were reduced, and 96.97% of the time was saved.