Higher Education

Improved Performance and Productivity through Workforce Optimization

Universities, private and public colleges, research facilities and other higher education institutions share many of the same challenges as private sector businesses, especially the challenge of doing more with fewer resources. Educational institutions need to find creative and effective ways to control costs, work within budget constraints and meet the needs of an active campus. The ability to plan, manage and monitor the productivity, performance and costs associated with creating a world-class learning environment is vital to ensuring success.

Technology Drives Performance In Higher Education

Executive Summary

As competition for faculty, students and funding intensifies, colleges and universities have to reexamine their overall operations to be more effective, efficient and agile. This needs to take place without sacrificing academic excellence or the flexibility to respond to demands driven by the dynamic needs of faculty and students, academic requirements and the competitive landscape.

Whether in a liberal arts college or a specialized business or engineering school, administration needs to provide an environment that supports traditions, creates new disciplines that expand upon the essentials of education and offers diverse learning options. Students are no longer satisfied with a predetermined curriculum that spans a four-year period and takes place on one campus. With the support of faculty and administration, students now expect a richer college experience that encompasses diverse options, from co-op programs and rotating internships to study abroad choices and online programs. Balancing all of this has become the ultimate “test” for universities and colleges.

Individuals responsible for the overall operations of a college or university constantly assess how resources are utilized. Administration at higher education institutions is turning to technology to address some of the most pressing challenges including:

• Managing a widely diverse and distributed workforce that includes faculty, staff, administration, students and often a contingent workforce such as adjunct or visiting professors
• Supporting the campus community’s mobility requirements
• Tackling complex pay, work and benefit accrual rules while complying with regulatory requirements
• Modernizing workforce and expense management processes to increase efficiencies and meet the needs of a diverse end-user community
• Eliminating payroll inaccuracies
• Ensuring and simplifying compliance with university policies and processes along with meeting government requirements and regulations

Colleges and universities are not immune to turbulence in the economy. It must be confronted in the short-term as well as how it will affect the ability of future students to afford a quality education. Many institutions have stepped up efforts to remain financially healthy in the future while maintaining a full commitment to their academic integrity. Many of these efforts are technology-based and will help provide universities with financial flexibility derived from efficient cost management to ensure that educational quality is not compromised. This paper examines workforce optimization and expense management automation and the opportunities and benefits they present to drive productivity in higher education. It also looks at enterprise application solutions available to manage and support the diverse populations and environments routinely found on campus.

Attracting New Students and Increasing Enrollment Pose New Challenges

Most campuses today are fully wired communities, with every student room, classroom and office connected to a campus network and the Internet. Colleges use an array of electronic resources to deliver the best experience for their students, faculty and staff. As a growing trend in this area, automated time, scheduling and attendance systems along with expense management automation solutions are becoming more necessary as colleges and universities turn to technology best practices to increase productivity and reduce costs. Increased and real-time responsiveness, staff and student mobility and self-service options are technology initiatives that contribute to a university’s operational efficiency which helps control costs.

For colleges and universities, ‘world-class’ is most often defined by a reputation of innovation along with academic excellence and prospective students often look to attend the college that has the best ‘pedigree.’ Colleges face an era of unprecedented competition; forty years ago 43% of incoming freshmen students applied to only one college. Today more than half of all students apply to at least four schools and some go well beyond this number. Enrollment at four-year schools is expected to grow by 165,000 through 2015 and the key questions now become, how do universities distinguish themselves to attract the students, faculty and funding needed to thrive and how does administration operate efficiently and productively while providing a supportive, challenging community and an inspiring educational experience?

Most institutions have turned to technology to improve the quality and even quantity of services and programs that they offer and have become more efficient and productive with shrinking resources. Not unlike private sector businesses, colleges and universities develop strategic plans that translate into goals and objectives for both academics and operations.

By employing automated workforce management solutions, the tasks of staffing, managing absence replacements, responding to student and faculty needs, meeting university and government regulations and maintaining accurate cost data become more efficient. Without a dashboard view of the campus community, visibility into resource availability and utilization is limited. In addition to day-to-day workforce management, the ability to make effective staffing choices is compromised, such as knowing when unnecessary overtime is being paid or employees or student workers being scheduled to work hours beyond what is considered safe or within contractual guidelines. Data intensive manual or semi-automated time keeping, scheduling and expense report processing practices are error prone and do not provide the flexibility for the real-time responsiveness that colleges and universities require to meet the demands of its campus community.

With an automated workforce and expense management system in place, administration benefits from the ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide real-time visibility. Universities can optimize schedules based on demand, and as a result, realize an increase in productivity while streamlining their operations and ensure that the right resources with appropriate skills are available when and where they need to be.

Drive Better Decisions

Administration needs to analyze, innovate, adapt and deliver in a complex and fluid setting. The most current, accurate and reliable data is needed to make timely decisions that can impact the quality of the educational experience.

With labor costs comprising more than half of a higher education institution’s operating budget, reduced spending and cost control have become critical concerns. Campuses are becoming more diverse, interactive and inclusive and the challenges of effectively and efficiently managing the staff and associated processes continue to escalate.

Reducing Operating Expenses by Controlling Labor and Expense Costs

Workforce and expense management solutions deliver real-time data that enable universities to allocate resources according to program and student needs. Colleges and universities have their own sets of KPIs that include peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity and acceptance rates, financial resources, alumni giving and a host of others that impact the ability to attract students and faculty.

Salaries, other compensation and employee expenses make up the largest part of a college’s operations budget. The administration needs to control and reduce these costs to manageable levels without negatively impacting educational quality. To achieve tighter cost control colleges with integrated and automated workforce and expense management systems are able to:

Maximize Efficiency

• Standardize and automate time and labor tracking to manage time worked, time off, sabbaticals and entitlements
• Provide efficient and comprehensive scheduling that supports academic, operational, student-driven and community-related program requirements to balance workforce efficiency and cost
• Automate the entire expense reporting process from report creation, submission and approval through reimbursement and post-payment audit to reduce time and cost
• Assign qualified replacements based upon availability at the appropriate level of credentials
• Support quality initiatives by deploying the right number of people with the right certifications and skills
• Simplify payroll processing while reducing payroll error rates inherent with a manual system
• Track labor and expense costs in a variety of configurations - by student, course, faculty, program, department, etc.
• Increase visibility into workforce movements, metrics, staff utilization, time and attendance data and skill set availability
• Staff to actual student allocation and faculty needs to minimize or eliminate potential overstaffing and coverage gaps
• Reduce time theft (resulting from extended breaks, tardy arrivals and early departures) and “buddy punching” (when one employee “clocks in” for another)
• Realize cost savings from having real-time accurate data available for decision making

 Accurate, Agile and Automated – Scheduling at its Best

For those relying on a manual or semi-automated system, it is mind boggling when considering the amount of ‘unrealized’ time spent on workforce management issues and accurate resource allocation. Leading colleges and universities are looking for ways to save both time and money through workforce optimization solutions that include automated scheduling which plays a critical role in efficient resource allocation by providing:

Cost Control

• Accurate cost accounting by program, subject, instructor or student to identify actual costs
• The right resource at the best cost when creating new programs, granting sabbaticals or managing unexpected absences
• Accurate time tracking and allocation as critical elements in obtaining and maintaining entitlement and discretionary grants, as these are key components in grant funding
• Support for complex business rules through a single engine to manage all campus workforce rules including pay, scheduling and accrual rules
• Accrual management that provides self-service functions to allow employees and faculty to monitor ‘actuals’ against entitlements
• Streamlined operations through automated scheduling
• Error elimination by replacing time consuming, tedious manual processes
• Deployment of the right mix of people to respond to demand fluctuations
• Workforce scheduling solutions that ensure correct time and attendance data
• Accurate and real-time information for better management decisions
• 'Best practice' templates that reflect the most efficient staffing models
• Support for overtime equalization by assigning the lowest cost resource Increased regulatory compliance and adherence to university policies

Employee Satisfaction

Attracting and retaining the best people are important areas for higher learning institutions and administration often devotes extra efforts to create a positive work environment.  Employee satisfaction leads to lower turnover rates and recruiting costs. Also, efficient workforce deployment increases productivity and positively impacts the learning environment. Faculty and staff that enjoy their assignments and respect their organization are more likely to deliver an exceptional educational experience.  

An automated scheduling solution helps drive best practices by matching faculty and staff with expected workloads and allows employees to have input into their schedules. Faculty and staff can easily manage their availability for time off, arrange the coverage they need and ensure continuity during sabbaticals or extended absences. Utilizing automated workforce and expense solutions improves employee satisfaction and empowers employees by providing:

• Intuitive on-line access to schedules, time sheets, expense reports, leave requests, paid time benefits, sabbaticals and other self-service functions
• Multi-lingual support
• Easy user interaction to keep things simple, encouraging rapid and total adoption
• More face time with students and other staff by reducing time spent on administrative tasks
• Consistent schedules that are better aligned with employees’ work/life preferences
• Optimum employee deployment to improve employee satisfaction
• Data visibility for better workforce management decisions

Improved Accountability and Compliance

The regulatory environment continues to pose demands and challenges on colleges and universities and the documentation and recordkeeping requirements of this increased level of regulation must be closely managed. Not being in compliance can have dramatic financial and public consequences and compliance with external and internal regulations has become critical for administration. Colleges and universities can best meet regulatory demands through automation of the following:

• Workforce management processes across departments, locations or other designations
• FLSA, absence management, FMLA recordkeeping and reporting
• Complex business processes with workflow capabilities to manage all workforce rules including pay, work, scheduling, accrual rules and others
• Best-in-class corporate quality initiatives by measuring time, attendance and scheduling performance while reducing payroll inaccuracies and standardizing scheduling
• Expense management that goes beyond travel and entertainment, to process all employee expenses to achieve greater control over costs, improved compliance and increased visibility into operations
• Real-time integration with ERP and other back office systems

Accurate time and attendance management and recordkeeping are areas where workforce optimization plays a critical role. Under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) covered employers, which most colleges and universities are, must grant time off to ‘eligible’ employees; the definition of which is multi-faceted. Having an automated workforce management system in place can benefit institutions that must grant such leaves and assure that requirements have been accurately met.
In addition, colleges and universities have the expectation that their faculty be comprised of professors, as well as scholars, artists and other experts. As such, they routinely grant sabbaticals to faculty members as an important part of recruiting and retaining top professors.  Sabbaticals provide faculty with opportunities to engage with peers and advance their research, enabling to return to the workforce with enhanced knowledge, new insight and renewed enthusiasm, which directly benefits the students.  Sabbatical entitlements and leave replacement policies need to be closely monitored for compliance and automation of leave tracking helps to ensure accuracy.
Another key regulatory driver for the automation of workforce management is related to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). FLSA establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping and child labor standards, which can affect all members of the campus community. The risk of failing to comply with this requirement would likely result in severe penalties. By gaining detailed insight into specific workforce metrics, compliance with the FLSA and other government regulations can be ensured and overtime payments minimized.

Expense Management Automation

Expense Management Automation (EMA) solutions give colleges and universities the power to attack the high cost of expense processing at its source: the actual ‘point of spend.’ EMA solutions allow the entire employee expense cycle to be automated, from pre-trip authorization, expense report pre-population and workflow approval and report creation through to travel booking integration, audit, reimbursement, receipts management and post-payment reporting and analysis. EMA solutions handle every aspect of expense processing and increase operating efficiencies when integrated with existing back end general ledger systems.

With automated expense management, institutions gain accurate and complete data for analyzing all expenses pertaining to programs, courses or community service and outreach. To have this data readily available in real-time empowers decision makers to make choices that are cost effective and offer the greatest return.

Automating the approval processes normally required in expense reimbursement gives time back to directors, managers, department heads and supervisors who previously had to spend hours checking expense reports for validity and reliability before giving their approval. Variances that are not in compliance or not within standard university policy are flagged for immediate detection and the manager has the ability to approve, delay or deny payment.

The Challenges of Mobility

With so many activities taking place outside of the physical campus, colleges and universities have seen a tremendous increase in the number of faculty, students and administrators that spend more time off campus than on. Colleges and universities face increased challenges to enable and empower this mobility. The challenges go beyond delivering Internet or email access to those not physically located on campus to providing select, critical applications to this mobile community in a consistent, secure and robust deployment. The goal is to bring critical enterprise applications to this mobile component of a university’s ranks - wherever they are - rather than forcing them to the enterprise applications.

This “transient” segment of a university often has the same pressures as on-site faculty and administration to comply with university policies, processes and procedures. These mobile groups or “untethered” workers need secure, reliable access to the college’s enterprise-class applications in real-time to perform productively and effectively, while adhering to university policies and standards. Whether it is a semester abroad program in London, a faculty leader and group of students rebuilding homes in New Orleans, or a faculty member holding music class at a concert hall, best-in-class solutions need to support a host of applications that include time capture, employee self-service, expense management, labor distribution and approvals to meet the needs of increased mobility.

Choosing To Automate

Once the decision to automate is made, administrators must to keep in mind the institution’s needs and how managing workforce movement and metrics influences overall operations to make certain that the solution is proactive. It should provide alerts and drive best practice workflow to help optimize key scheduling tasks, enable department heads and managers to track staff performance against specific objectives/metrics and provide the ability to quickly and easily take appropriate corrective actions in accordance with university policies. Look to the solution to provide end-users with the flexibility to replicate, improve on and automate complex scheduling processes that are needed to remain efficient and competitive.

Workforce and expense management applications should be viewed as having the potential to be touched by virtually everyone directly connected with the campus community. These applications need to be intuitive and easy to use with little or no training. Ease-of-use and familiarity with the system encourage more rapid and widespread adoption and offer immediate productivity gains, delivering a better return on the technology investment.

Versatile and Flexible Technology

When choosing a solution, be sure to look for applications that meet cost requirements by offering the flexibility of either an in-house license fee model or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) On-Demand delivery model. The latter may speed the implementation process at a more affordable price. This flexibility ensures the solution will continue to meet current and future needs without running the risk of being outgrown.
The selected solution needs to meet the ongoing needs of a diverse campus community. Potential system administrators and end-users need to look at how the solution is architected to determine how flexible it will be in addressing today’s requirements as well as those anticipated in the future. A best-of-breed solution should offer personalization for each user segment (faculty, students, administration) to address specific requirements, maximize user productivity and increase user satisfaction.

Achieving Best-in-Class

The campus environment requires more decision-making than many leading businesses as administration juggles the needs of a diverse campus community. Critical technology solutions that aid colleges and universities in meeting their academic and operations goals deliver the ability to:

• Manage a diverse and distributed campus comprised of faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staffs
• Achieve better overtime and cost control with fewer payroll inaccuracies
• Realize productivity gains through effective and efficient scheduling for all employee groups, from maintenance workers and office staff to administration and faculty
• Integrate with back-office systems such as ERP and payroll
• Address pay, work, leave, sabbatical and accrual rules
• Comply with regulatory requirements
• Be flexible and responsive to student and faculty needs to remain competitive
• Implement cost control measures to stabilize rising tuition costs without compromising quality
• Comply with FMLA, FLSA and other government mandates

Web-based robust workforce and expense management solutions that provide best-in-class time and attendance, employee scheduling and optimization and expense management components that are fully integrated and scalable can help colleges and universities remain competitive. These solutions enable colleges and universities to return their focus to the mission of providing top-quality educational experiences.

About CyberShift, Inc.
CyberShift, Inc. is a leading provider of workforce and expense management software and services focused on helping mid-sized to large, complex organizations improve organizational performance and profitability. Through its integrated CyberShift Workforce 3G™, which includes time and attendance, advanced scheduling and reporting and analytics, companies can more effectively plan, manage and deploy their workforces, reduce costs and improve processes across business operations. CyberShift Expense™ automates the processing and facilitates the management of employee business expenses such as travel and entertainment and helps companies improve compliance, enforce expense policies and procedures and increase visibility into operations. Offered in both traditional license fee and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery models, CyberShift’s innovative solutions have been awarded U.S. and Canadian patents. CyberShift is the first enterprise-class workforce and expense management solution provider to enable support for the BlackBerry platform.

US News and World Report, “Don’t Worry: There’s A College For You,” Linda Kulman. August 17, 2007.