Technology is exponentially growing and manual systems are increasingly becoming a major liability to any learning institutions just like for any other business enterprise. Something that school or college administrators should be wary of.

Day-to-day activities like admitting students, receiving fee payments, processing examination results, managing staff, managing suppliers, communicating to the school’s stakeholders among other processes are simply becoming cumbersome hence extremely complex to run them manually. Basically running an institution like a school without automation is largely unsustainable.

To eliminate or simplify this complexity, heads of learning institutions eg schools and colleges should consider automating their administrative process so as to save on time and costs thus focusing their energies and resources on what matters– performance of the school.

This is simply Business Process Automation (BPA). BPA is a way by which institutions take out the complex, most redundant steps from their processes and streamline them for simplicity. In plain terms, BPA is a hands-free, innovative approach to systematize critical business processes.

Benefits of Automating your Institution’s Processes

1. Streamlined communication

Calls, emails, sticky notes, conversations during staff meetings, Board, Parents Teachers Association (PTA) or Annual General Meetings (AGMs) are really good ways and platforms to discuss tasks and progress of the school, but can be terrible as your team/school grows and collaboration is required.

An automated workflow enables your teams to huddle together around individual items in a workflow and get things done in a simple, streamlined way.

School or college automation software like Bunifu ERP for Schools offers a range of capabilities. The visual dashboard helps you to monitor progress in all departments at one go. Every item in progress has its own line of communication so all of your conversation is recorded in the right place.

2. Automation Enforces Accountability

When you automate your school’s workflow, you create an owner for each step of the process. Initiations, approvals, rejections, and input tasks are all bound to an individual expected to perform an action.

As a administrator, enabling that level of information transparency in your school’s process enforces accountability on all stakeholders. Consequently, applying automation to your school or college will help you identify which tasks are taking the longest, or at what point a task tends to get stuck most frequently or which task was not done the way it is supposed to be done.

3. Minimize costs and manual errors

By substituting human vulnerabilities with the accuracy of a machine, you bypass the expensive costs associated with manual errors and inefficiencies. Late fee payments, slow processing of exams and release of results, and payments for goods never received are all very expensive errors. Automation can also save lots of administrative labor costs.

4. Keep a tab on your institution’s processes

An automated system not only lets you see the status of any individual item, it also gives you the bird’s-eye view of your whole system. Imagine what you could do with several months of data from an automated system. With an automated workflow tool, you can track what has been happening while you are away.

5. Establish a clear approval hierarchy

When you create a custom workflow, you can assign approval responsibilities to anyone in the school, regardless of the reporting structure.

A busy supervisor doesn’t need to be on every step/task (unless he/she prefers) and you don’t have to have secret pre-meetings in the boardroom before getting a project approved!