The Business Process Management Systems to Improve the Performance of Universities: Integrated Performance Plan

Introduction And Motivation

Teaching Management Area is a key part of the higher educational structure as the Departments of the universities because it involves all students and teachers. Universities have proposed several different methodologies to improve efficiency and realize the goals of the administration (Zhang et al., 2012). The administration management system is crucial to support students and teachers to perform their work in an efficient way (Jin, 2014). However, there are many problems with the different activities supported by these administrative management systems. For example, two essential activities supported by administrative management systems are: the student’s study plan management (university internship program) and administrative support to the management of the courses of study (students’ enquiries, designing the study plan, etc.). In these activities there could be many problems such as the synchronization of information among the actors of the processes; each member of the staff managing the courses performs different non-standard activities to complete the tasks; problems of communication with students, etc. The above problems lead to increasing the time required to meet the needs of teachers and students (Erasmus program, Syllabus, classrooms management, lecture schedule, etc.) and potential errors during the processes, reducing the performance of the administrative staff working in the Teaching Management Area and the level of quality perceived by students.

The development of a process-driven model can contribute to overcome the above problems and support the continuous improvement of the administrative management system in order to increase customer satisfaction in terms of quality (error rate reduction as the overlapping classroom schedule or incorrect information provided to the students), efficiency (saving of time) and agility (implementation of processes of changes). In the context studied the costs are fixed for Teaching Management Area and the greater efficiency allows to extend the services of the area. The strategic management of the processes allows to analyse the current conditions and take into account students, administrative personnel, teachers and other stakeholders in order to achieve continuous improvements. Moreover, Departments need to determine and monitor the short-term action plans at the operational level in order to implement the strategic plan successfully.

The objective of the research proposed is to develop a process-driven model applied to the Teaching Management Area of the School of Engineering at University of Basilicata (UniBas), a public University located in one of the Southern regions of Italy. The process-driven model is aided by a software to automate and evaluate by the simulation the effectiveness of the process modelled. The main driver is the system of Self-Evaluation, Periodic Evaluation and Accreditation (AVA) of Italian Universities. ANVUR (National Agency for Evaluation of the University System and Research), in its evaluation process, refers to the Quality Assurance system as described in European Standard Guidelines ESG (ENQA, 2005,2009)

In this context, the harmonization of the tertiary education systems in the European area of higher education, the main purpose of the Bologna process, certainly cannot be achieved only by sharing an organization in cycles of study programmes, but it presupposes the sharing of learning objectives and the guarantee of their achievement. Referring to the ISO 9000, the ‘quality assurance of education’ is the whole of the activities (processes) for the management of the educational service aimed at achieving the established educational objectives and then at ‘ensuring trust’ in meeting the quality requirements to all stakeholders. Therefore, the quality assurance activities focus on the activities needed to provide objective evidence of the quality achieved, where with ‘objective evidence’ the ISO 9000 norm intends «data that support the evidence or the truth of something». The process approach is one of the eight quality management principles upon which the whole ISO 9000 series of standards is based. This principle states that a desired result is achieved more efficiently when activities and related resources are managed as a process.

The work developed for the Teaching Management Area can be extended to the process management to support the risk assessment. Furthermore, the numerical results of the simulation support the decision about the organization.