21 May 2019
Charter School Process Workflow Automaion Nintex Office 365 Optimum

Case Study: Charter School automates the Summer School selection process

Classical Charter Schools prepares K-8th grade scholars in the South Bronx to excel in college preparatory high schools. Through a classical curriculum and highly structured setting, students become liberated scholars and citizens of impeccable character who achieve proficiency in and advanced mastery of New York State Performance Standards.

The school offers a Summer Learning Academy (SLA) program to both incoming students and returning students. The process for vetting and enrolling students into the educational summer camps is complex, involving time-frames and deadlines, various academic and attendance related student parameters, and dynamic movement of students data from one data source to another. Also, the data that was used in this process was originated from multiple systems and required consolidation and aggregation. Due to this data and process complexity, only a small number of school personnel were able to gather the data from its sources, contextualize it, and publish it in a meaningful way to classroom personnel.

To address these process and efficiency challenges, the client engaged Optimum to map, optimize, and automate the student summer camp vetting and enrollment process to increase efficiency and reduce operational time and cost to perform this process on an annual basis.

Optimum mapped and engineered the work processes required to automate the selection and enrollment of students into the summer academy. We then defined and documented the approval workflows, notifications, student-related metrics, data flows, and systems of origin. Timelines were developed to reflect the necessary triggering of automated document generation and alerts/notifications, while data thresholds were recorded to appropriately trigger student flagging for list assignment. Additionally, templates representing auto-generated letters and emails were assessed for workflow automation.

By utilizing SharePoint Online (Office 365) and Nintex’s Workflow Automation Platform, Optimum then automated the entire summer camp evaluation and enrollment process for each individual grade and within all of the client’s schools.

This automation greatly reduced email-based collaboration and manual review/approval processes and allowed for the viewing of near-real-time student performance data, list allocation, and camp enrollment status.  

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