Consider the following process for the admission of graduate students at a unive
ID: 342935 • Letter: C
Question
Consider the following process for the admission of graduate students at a university. In order to apply for admission, students first fill in an online form. Online applications are recorded in an information system to which all staff members involved in the admissions process have access to. After a student has submitted the online form, a PDF document is generated and the student is requested to download it, sign it, and send it by post together with the required documents, which include: • Certified copies of previous degree and academic transcripts. • Results of English language test. • Curriculum vitae. When these documents are received by the admissions office, an officer checks the completeness of the documents. If any document is missing, an e-mail is sent to the student. The student has to send the missing documents by post. Assuming the application is complete, the admissions office sends the certified copies of the degrees to an academic recognition agency, which checks the degrees and gives an assessment of their validity and equivalence in terms of local education standards. This agency requires that all documents be sent to it by post, and all documents must be certified copies of the originals. The agency sends back its assessment to the university by post as well. Assuming the degree verification is successful, the English language test results are then checked online by an officer at the admissions office. If the validity of the English language test results cannot be verified, the application is rejected (such notifications of rejection are sent by e-mail). Once all documents of a given student have been validated, the admission office forwards these documents by internal mail to the corresponding academic committee responsible for deciding whether to offer admission or not. The committee makes its decision based on the academic transcripts and the CV. The committee meets once every 2 to 3 weeks and examines all applications that are ready for academic assessment at the time of the meeting. At the end of the committee meeting, the chair of the committee notifies the admissions office of the selection outcomes. This notification includes a list of admitted and rejected candidates. A few days later, the admission office notifies the outcome to each candidate via e-mail. Additionally, successful candidates are sent a confirmation letter by post.
With respect to the above process, consider the following questions:
1. Comment on how is the process performing using activity time as a measure of process performance
2. What are other measures that can be used to assess the process performance?
3. If this process is to be incrementally improved, suggest an improvement plan.
4. If this process is to be automated, suggest an automation plan. Which type of process technology should be used?
5. If this process to be reengineered, suggest a redesigned process.
6. What could be some (failure) factors that could disallow the implementation of the redesigned process?
Explanation / Answer
1. The process is very slow as compared to the speed of other processes in this age of information. The application takes months to reach its final outcome, leaving the candidate in wait and uncertainty for too long.
2. Besides time, money and efforts can also be seen as measure of performance. The multiple actions involved in the process need money as well as repeated efforts from human resources to make it successful.
3. For swift action on the application, the processes need to be integrated and repetitive actions need to be eliminated so time and efforts can be saved. Further, the need for the posting should be entirely replaced by email. Another measure is to increase the frequency of admission committee to enhance efficiency and reduce waiting time.
4. The steps for online application, verification, and sending of signed copies through post should be integrated. The verification should be done through digital signatures, and the authentication of degrees should also be a part of the integrated system where universties should instantly verify their degrees, saving cost and time. The English language test performance needs to be filled up at the time of filling up application form only. The output of this integrated process should only be left with manual weekly decision by admission committee.
5. Redesigned process should have integrated plan for application and verification, to be completed within a week of application. The output of verified credentials should be used by the admission committee in the coming week to make final decision.
6. The hinderances could be in the form of refusal to comply with the process on the part of external agencies, legal hinderanaces, cases that need international verification processes or infeasibility for the university to implement and adopt an integrated system due to resource deficiency and limitations.