Industry: Education | Product: Adobe LiveCycle ES | Adobe LiveCycle Process Management ES | Avoka Search ‘n Fill | Avoka Enquiry Tool | Avoka Process Invoker | Avoka Components for Adobe LiveCycle
Spread over six campuses in Greater Western Sydney – Penrith, Parramatta, Blacktown, Bankstown, Richmond and Campbelltown – UWS is no average sized university. Closely linked to Greater Western Sydney region, one of the nation’s economic powerhouses where ten per cent of all Australians live, it has a teaching and research structure designed to meet the challenges of the new economy.
The University is a large, culturally diverse organisation, with over 2,000 staff and about 35,000 students drawn from Australia and around the world. In 2007, UWS had an operating expenditure of $392.8 million.
UWS rely on an online environment to operate the majority of their systems. Students at UWS use the online student system, MyStudentRecords, to manage their enrolment at University. However, many of the forms that students are required to complete as part of the management of their enrolment were paper-based, and were increasingly at odds with the rest of the online based systems.
Therefore, the University wanted to transform the remaining paper-based forms to electronic versions which would only be an innovative move for a university but would also allow students to self-serve – managing for themselves their administration online.
“I have processed my rule waivers - too easy! Also, what I like is that I can go back and view these forms later on and I don't have to take any copies!”
Michelle Cull, Head of Program
Furthermore, capabilities could extend from front-end into the staff systems too -workflow approvals and automatic updating of the Callista Student Systems could be created so that the organisation benefits from more resource efficient back-office processes thus creating a smooth end-to-end procedure.
To answer all these requirements and provide long-term, far-reaching benefits for the university Avoka’s assistance was invoked. The Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) and a number of add-ons to LiveCycle built by Avoka were used to develop a solution that delivered both the e-forms and the business process management requirements of the university project.
The UWS paper forms were redeveloped as interactive PDF e-forms and incorporate the following functionality to satisfy UWS’ requirements:
- Form Completion – The e-form will be ‘fillable’ using Adobe Reader version 7.0.5 and later
- Form Data Validation – Where available, the form will validate the data entered in fields to ensure it is complete and accurate. This will be a combination of simple validations such as Numeric Only, Maximum and Minimum field length and more complex ones that require web service calls
- Hide & show logic – Based on the answers provided by the user, the form will dynamically ‘hide & show’ sections of the form to ensure that the user only sees information relevant to the topic they are currently entering
- Form Submission – The form will support electronic submission of the form data to the back-office, and integrates seamlessly with the appropriate workflow
- Pre-population – Student details such as name, student ID and contact details will be pre-populated in the form when a student opens it. As the student has logged in to the system using their UWS user name and ID, the student’s details are automatically carried over from the University’s student database into the form
- The fields will be read-only to prevent the user from changing these values, and in the case where the details are incorrect, help text will instruct the student to update the details in MyStudentRecords
- In-form audit – key actions, such as form submission, will be recorded and displayed in the form with date, time and the user who performed the action
- Form Branding – The form contains appropriate UWS, Name, Address, Contact Details and ABN
- Office Use Only – A read-only, office use only section will be displayed in the form at all times for use by administration staff on printed forms
- Printing – If a student is ready to submit a form but does not have access to an online connection to do so electronically, completed e-forms can also be printed and handed in at the admin centre for processing. Blank e-forms can also be printed and filled by hand.
“WOW! Love the E -system... Excellent”
Peta Imber, student
Students as well as staff involved in the approval process have experienced significant benefits.
- Improved service to students: students can submit forms online
- Improved service to staff: staff can approve forms through the online system at their own convenience, and no longer have queues of students at their offices
- Improved quality control/data management: auditing is improved by built-in validation and through electronic authorisation processes, leading to fewer cases of student fraud
- Lower resourcing and adminstration costs: the electronic submission and automated workflow means less manual processing of forms for staff
- Improved sustainability/paper savings: paper forms are now electronic
- Innovation: although most Universities in Australia have online systems similar to the one operating at UWS, they still have many of the basic processes as a manual, paper based system, like UWS did before the introduction of LiveCycle.
