Workflow Wonders featuring Trinity Grammar

Our recent Workflow Wonders webinar featured Mark Thompson, Business Applications Leader, Trinity Grammar School, and Gavin Adams, Solutions Architect at Synergy, a Nintex Certified Partner. Mark and Gavin discussed how Nintex Workflow Cloud was used to rapidly automate student absences, providing a simple, fast, and accurate way for parents to log absences using a mobile app.  

Data input coming from multiple sources

Trinity Grammar is a multi-campus school based in Sydney, Australia. The school has over 2,250 students enrolled over three campuses. There are more than 3,600 parents and 700 staff who are also part of the school community.  

Every morning the administration team at Trinity manages student absences, which are submitted by parents. In the past absences were received in a variety of ways including paper, email, telling a teacher or staff member, via an app, phone calls, or record book entries. The manual capture of data caused multiple challenges for the administration team – from the time it was taking to enter data into the central systems, to errors due to manual processing, as well as inconsistent or incomplete data. Staff were spending a lot of time working out which student parents were submitting absence requests for due to lack of data.  

Remote learning moves forms online

During the COVID-19 pandemic, students moved to remote learning. The Trinity IT team and Nintex partner Synergy moved quickly to build an automated student attendance form – it was operational in two days. The online form allowed students to log their attendance each morning via a simple form. There were around 2000 forms submitted between 7.30 am and 9.30 am each day during remote learning.  

Once on-campus learning resumed, the success of the student attendance form made it clear that an automated solution for processing student absences was needed. As part of the move to automation, the IT team used Nintex Promapp to review and map current processes. Key stakeholders were included in the review to understand what data was being collected, and how it was being used and processed.  

Trinity moved to a single way to submit student absences, via a mobile app. Each parent has their own account, which is personalized with their children’s IDs. Student absence request forms are now pre-populated with key data, and all forms must include all required data fields to be complete before they can be submitted.  

Automating tasks speeds up processing times

Two workflows were built in Nintex Workflow Cloud to manage the flow of submitted forms. On average 140 forms per day are submitted and form processing needs to be completed before 10.30 am. At 10.30 am an alert is sent via text message to all parents notifying them of any unexplained absences. 

“Being able to process all of the leave applications for the day is important to get through pretty quickly,” explained Thompson. “… Being able to process those in a quick way is a game-changer, especially getting in before that 10.30 am cut-off.”  

The first workflow is kicked off once a completed form is submitted via the app. This workflow has no human interaction; it grabs the data as it comes in, fixes any data quality issues such as dates and times, and then moves the completed data into the central database. It has been designed to capture and process information quickly.  

The second workflow is an approval workflow, which can take as little as ten minutes to complete, or longer depending on what data needs to be processed. The workflow has a multi-user approval task, which can be allocated across a pool of administration staff. All absence request forms must have a government code applied manually by staff around how an absence is categorized. For example, there are different codes for being sick or going on holiday. A request can be rejected or flagged with a request for more information from parents, including allowing them to attach documents like medical certificates – which helps to reduce manual processing.  

Once a form is categorized it can then be moved into the central system and the workflow is complete. Nintex Analytics is used in the backend to provide visibility of the volumes of submissions in real-time and to track any problems or issues that occur. 

What’s next for Trinity Grammar?

Trinity Grammar still has a lot of paper-based processes in use and the IT team has multiple projects coming up to automate and digitize their operations. They plan to continue to use Nintex Workflow Cloud and some of their upcoming projects include: 

• Student attendance form – a mobile form to mark the roll and add new students 
• Student injury form – a mobile form to log injuries 
• Infringements and detentions form 
• PDF generation and distribution 

Watch the complete recording on-demand now to hear more about how Trinity Grammar School is automating processes across the organization.