A workflow and approval process solution expands on campus

Seven years ago, Information Technology Services (ITS) at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, chose Integrify as its workflow and approval process solution. The initial application streamlined the hiring and budget request processes. Now almost every department in the university, with 12,000 undergraduates and 3,000 faculty and staff, uses the process management system. Anyone on campus making a budget, hiring, reimbursement or travel request goes through the Integrify solution.

The newest process, Baylor’s most extensive to date, is for submission and approval of expense reports for travel. The university uses the database push/pull utility to write out data to local reporting tables in its financial system, which provides administrative users better visibility into travel expenses by category or department. Once a request is approved for payment, the accounts payable office can run a job that takes this data and creates a voucher in the financial system to issue the payment.

For departments making requests, Integrify provides real-time and 360-degree visibility into the project life cycle for the request. From the time users launch the browser to enter the request data, they can see what steps are involved in getting an approval and where their request is in the process, and they receive updates on the status through e-mail notifications.

Pete Able, manager of human resources and financial systems at Baylor, says, “Before moving to the Integrify solution, there was a lot of confusion on the backend of the budget process—we're geographically and operationally distributed with different schools and deans all needing to make and manage requests. From the smallest academic request for a new faculty position to a major capital request for a new building, there is associated financial request data to be reviewed on the administrative side. Often the people making the request didn't know who to contact or how to proceed.”

Able continues, “We needed a system that would help the administrators by giving them visibility into all the request data, but even more so, something that would help the requesters follow the right practice while making a request. In the past, we have had to reject requests because the person making the request skipped a step, failed to supply all the pertinent information and the like. Now with Integrify and its easy-to-use, 100 percent Web-based interface, we have greatly reduced these problems.”

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