Category
Technology
Submitted By
Rick Rowcotsky, Rick.Rowcotsky@cu.edu, Lead Solutions Manager
Project Team
Rick Rowcotsky, Rick.Rowcotsky@cu.edu, Lead Solutions Manager
Rakesh Vangapati, rakesh.vangapati@cu.edu, Peoplesoft Developer
Brad Baker, brad.baker@cu.edu, Assistant Director Student System Development
Mayank Mittal, mayank.mittal@cu.edu, Enterprise Apps Admin Manager
Project Description
The CU-SIS Financial Aid team has been able to create and ultimately drive adoption on a product that has helped to eliminate hours of work each day for our campus partners, all while also improving security and data retention practices. The automations that we were able to create assist campuses every day to download and process files from the Department of Education, alleviating a pain point for campus Financial Aid offices that has existed for decades at CU. This solution spans multiple systems across UIS offerings and seamlessly integrates them into financial aid processes.
Project Efficiency
The greatest efficiency of this project lies within its ability to eliminate manual processes at the campus level. Each day the campuses would be forced to log into a system and manually request files from the Department of Education, move them to their desktop/shared folders, SFTP the files to our servers and process each file individually. This often took many hours (and was particularly error prone) for each campus every single day. With our innovation, at the press of a button the files are downloaded and processed within campus solutions with extremely limited campus interaction.
Project Inspiration
The inspiration for this project came from our campus users and their frustration with the old system. We've long known about the Federal programs that can help to enable this process, but we were unable to move forward due to the difficulty in executing them. However, with a bit of hard work and applying a large dose of CU magic, we were able to make these changes a reality for our Financial Aid offices.
What Makes You Happiest about this Project?
This is one of my favorite projects that I've worked on during my time at System Administration, mostly because I know how much time it saves our campuses on a daily basis. I've projected that it saves roughly 1500 hours a year across all of our campuses - and every minute saved is a minute that can be applied to improving the rest of the financial aid process. There is not a doubt in my mind that this product will continue to provide value for CU long into the future.
