When the pandemic hit in 2020, St. John’s University had to pivot their processes extremely quickly. This meant eliminating paper from all university workflows. At first, many departments shifted students to email and phone communications. The Academic Processes and Procedures department was one of them.
The initial transition was smooth, but over time, the emails became a huge bottleneck. Information wasn’t submitted correctly, email chains went on for days, and conversations got lost in the shuffle. Eventually, Kevin suggested switching to Formstack. In a short amount of time, Kevin transferred all of the processes into Formstack Workflows. Now, students have one point of access for doing things like changing their major, updating their minor, and applying for a leave of absence. In a survey sent out after the process updates, 84% of students said they preferred the new Formstack submission process.
With Formstack, you do get high level data that you can't get anywhere else.
My name is Kevin James, I'm an Assistant Dean and Director of Fiscal and Administrative Affairs here at the St. John's University The Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies.
What were the challenges before using Formstack?
The one way we were actually inputting data was through paper. It just wasn't working. It became, yeah, we need something that was easy to use, that can take us from a paper form to more of a digitalization and allows us to optimize our workplace. And I think that was really where I felt like Formstack was the way to go.
What outcomes has Formstack helped you achieve?
I actually worked on with our television center to actually implement it for rental forms. With paper, you can only capture data at the moment that you have it. Because we went into this new model, we're actually now able to see how many students are taking out which equipment, which equipment is not getting that same type of treatment. And if that's the case, we can now make strategic business decisions and try to figure out what works best in order to optimize what we have. So I just think, honestly, the power of Formstack allows us to move away from paper, but it also gives us the ability to have insight.
How have you reimagined work using Formstack?
What was cool about this was that we opened up the door of changing how we approach not just saving time like at a machine, but also how do you change the dynamic at work. What Formstack has done for us, it actually provided us with the automation that we've been desperately needing for a very long time. We are now putting ourselves in a position to be extremely innovative, especially in this day and age.
