CityU :: Graduate Student Managment

Introduction

More and more people have been applying to graduate studies in the past few years. To cope with this growing demand, the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) at the City University of Hong Kong decided to create an advanced Web-based system to streamline the entire graduate/research student management workflow.

Handling rapid expansion, streamlining and simplifying workflows, sharing information horizontally and vertical, and creating a paperless community are all objectives made possible with RIMS - an Internet-based workflow tool for graduate student management.

Our Client

Established in 1984, the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has grown and developed at a remarkable pace to one of the leading tertiary institutes in Hong Kong. The number of students has increased significantly to more than 13,500 while number of academic programs offered has risen to more than 90. To meet this growing demand, the University has employed more than 800 full-time academic staff devoted to teaching, research and consultancy.

Business Needs

One of the roles of the SGS is to promote the postgraduate studies and research opportunities. This objective has to be achieved together with enhanced and scalable information management tool to collaborate with the expected expansion. While on the other hand, to inline with its IT strategic plan, the university encourages its administrative systems to be fully integrated in order to create a paperless environment.

Currently, the workload of the SGS is a workflow chain that starts from application submission, application review, application acceptance to postgraduate student registration and then monitoring of their progress up to graduation. This is an extremely heavy workload as each graduate student's study progress may be different. The SGS previously used a PowerBuilder application to assist their work, together with numerous printed reports distribute to related departments, students and candidates. Unfortunately, this old system was not able scale up to current workload demands.

Our RIMS graduate student management system helped reengineered the SGS workflows with advanced Web and AI technologies. Workflows became simpler, making the system more scalable and convenient to use.

Technology

One of our major objectives is to re-engineer the entire workflow into a streamlined and efficient one. Information sharing vertically and horizontally within the CityU Intranet is made possible. To achieve such goals, we use state-of-the-art Web technologies coupled with AI workflow techniques. Our RIMS application interfaces to the University's central database for student records and course/program information.

Business Benefits

With RIMS, the workflow of SGS is being streamlined and facilitated with Internet tools, and hence become much more efficient. On the other hand, information sharing horizontally within the office and vertically amongst the whole university has become highly convenient. Moreover, the communication between SGS, other departments, postgraduate students as well as candidates and applicants have been greatly enhanced.

Last but not least, since the entire workflow can be processed electronically, and thus RIMS has taken a major role in creating a paperless community in the school.

Last modified: Thursday, 28-Apr-2005 16:38:03 HKT

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