Delivering Next Level Appointment Approvals in HR

Managing a thriving university with a positive growth curve has inherent challenges. With outdated, inefficient backend processes, the associated challenges were costing QUT both time and money.

The need to remove repetitive manual processes and duplication of work, fix compliance issues and take significant cost out of the business was ever present.

In particular the QUT Human Resources (HR) appointments process was lengthy, labour intensive, error prone, expensive and created high potential legal and compliance risk.

With 13 different faculties, QUT’s Human Resources department handles more than 6,500 employee extension contracts annually, 3,000 new appointments and 14,000-17,000 sessional academic employee appointments each year. This mammoth load was being performed by a team of just six people, using six different paper forms. The employment forms alone were four pages long, required an average of five separate approval steps, and it could take up to two weeks before a potential employee received their contract.

After an extensive market evaluation, QUT selected Roboyo to deliver the efficiencies they needed to deliver better outcomes for staff and students.

It was critical for QUT that the project addressed the need to reduce bureaucracy, standardize and automate repetitive procedures, improve process compliance and risk management, create visible audit trails, make it possible for business owners to monitor and report on key performance indicators and reduce operating costs; all while creating an exceptional experience for staff and students.

After consulting with the QUT team Roboyo identified low-code technology as the most optimum solution and specifically the Appian digital transformation platform.

With a combination of low-code, robotics process automation (RPA) and business process management (BPM), Roboyo digitized the highly manual and time-consuming HR approval process, replacing it with a system that is compliant with policy and procedure and enables online acceptance by new employees.

Several key drivers of change were addressed by the intelligent automation project, including the need to improve staff and student experiences, reduce compliance risk and reduce operational costs.

In just 8 weeks, by removing all points of duplication and manual handling Roboyo’s solution resulted in 86% faster processing times and reduced the cost of processing appointment applications by 50%. This also resulted in a high degree of data integrity along with a transparent audit trail.

The integration of RPA has allowed QUT to adapt the new platforms for work with existing processes and technology, such as payroll. This helped maximise ROI and keep the overall project cost and duration to a minimum while still creating significant improvements.

In the first semester of operation the new system enabled all sessional academic appointments to be entered by a robot, freeing up payroll and HR employees from time-consuming data entry.

It has also improved the employee experience and privacy of individual appointees as they are now able to enter their own personal data once the application has been approved.

By transforming their HR operations, QUT have seen a significant increase in staff motivation and overall work satisfaction. QUT teams are now able to focus on tasks that are essential to the university’s growth while leveraging the use of intelligent automation in their systems for process intensive repetitive tasks.