BPM+ECM in the Russian universities

  The Russian universities owing to their large number should compete among themselves both for students, and for teachers. Therefore many seriously think of the description, improvement and automation of the internal processes, not unreasonably believing that it will allow them to increase efficiency of primary activity, so, and competitiveness.

At the same time it is important to the universities beginning the project on improvement and process automation to understand that the correct determination of priorities allows to create the list of key processes competently. For universities like those is the following.

Management processes:

• formation of the basic curriculum, formation of curricula on specialties and thread scheduling of educational groups;
• planning of volumes of pedagogical load of employees on departments taking into account qualification;
• formation of the schedule of educational process and grid of occupations taking into account employment of teachers and resources;
• work planning of the certification and examination commissions.

Basic processes:

• methodical ensuring training;
• enrollment of students;
• execution of curricula and schedule;
• quality control of training of specialists;
• scientific work, etc.

The providing processes:

• personnel management;
• administrative activity;
• security;
• accounting;
• contract management and calculations;
• management of finance, etc.
  • 1 XLIFFService: Sequence contains no elements

Further it is reasonable to detail key processes of university in the form of art works that will allow to define actions for their optimization, and, above all, to create requirements to their further automation. The description of processes in itself will not allow to optimize activity of university — tools which will help to fix advanced processes are for this purpose necessary and also to minimize the movement of paper documents.

It is also necessary to consider what for process maintenance "be in good shape" it it is regularly necessary to improve, eliminating "excess" transactions, for example, using horizontal and vertical compression. The essence of such approach is extremely simple. Horizontal compression assumes the general minimization of number of participants of process, and vertical — an exception from it of the people occupying the highest steps of managerial hierarchy. As a result it is possible to accelerate significantly execution of processes (occasionally even many times!), and, above all — to reduce their cost. Many optimization actions are connected not only with organizational solutions in process, but also using information technologies which allow to record process in a certain framework and to provide its controllability.

As management of most universities is constructed just like state structures, automation of their activity often should be begun with implementation of the most demanded tools to which number, undoubtedly, it is possible to carry an electronic document management system. Meanwhile classical document flow — an essential, but not the main part of internal processes of university. The basis of their activity is formed by the specialized procedures connected with such processes as formation of schedules, planning of loading of teachers and use of premises, accounting of these students (cards of progress, personal plans, etc.), contractual relations (with students, teachers) and many other things. The listed processes require documentary maintenance, and quite diverse and regularly updated.

This huge layer of tasks lies on a joint of automation of two technologies — process managements and content managements — and respectively requires use at automation of the systems of the class BPM and ECM. It is possible to be limited to automation on the basis of BPM, having imposed control of such processes on these solutions as enrollment of students, planning of the schedule. However at full-scale automation it is necessary to look at a task more widely, meaning also abilities to manage unstructured content. There is a lot of tasks for solutions of this kind in universities.

When all processes are described and optimized, there is a question as to implement them among modern IT. And here BPM-and ECM systems allowing to construct the full-fledged automation system of university and to support such processes just come to the rescue:

• management of schedules. In a system the maintaining a uniform grid of occupations of all university connected with resource fund for armoring of premises taking into account loading of teachers, with curricula of groups can be implemented;
• data management of student's structure. The personal and group cards of students, curricula, accounting of progress and attendance tied to an access control system;
• maintaining contract activities. Approval, storage and tracking of terms of relevance of agreements of teachers, the invited lecturers, students who are trained on a commercial basis;
• support of the procedure of enrollment of students. Accounting of the statements given to EG, additional tests, drawing up ratings and so forth.

Let's notice that in addition to these key processes the full ECM solution will allow to automate also many, perhaps, not tied to the accurate regulated processes of aspect of activity of educational institution. So, the electronic archive can be used not only for storage of documentation connected with the organization of educational process but also for creation, say, of private storages for the training materials at different rates created by teachers and available to students. And it is possible, and for work with the digitized high school library stock.

Mobile access to an ECM system promotes significant acceleration of processes of approval and vising of documents from the management of university. The convenience of mobile access to system peak load periods, for example, in receptive period of entrants is especially notable.

Use of the electronic digital signature (EDS) even within one university and its branches will significantly reduce the volume of the movement of paper document revisions at least due to transfer to an electronic form of all internal document flow.

Not less useful to universities can be solutions in the field of text analytics and knowledge management:

• the intra high school search systems providing quick and relevant search on arrays of scientific and technical information, materials of Research and Development and training courses, publications of employees and students of university;
• the systems of anti-plagiarism allowing to find the facts of loan and copying in papers and term papers of unfair students;
• the systems of search of experts which automatically build profiles of competences and the interests of research associates, teachers, graduate students and other specialists by indexing of open publications, blogs, internal correspondence by e-mail;
• technologies of crowdsourcing and creation of expert networks for different data domains.
  

• Source of PCWEEK