Case Study: Iowa State University achieves streamlined grant approvals and improved customer service with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Process Automation

Iowa State University Streamlines Processes, Improves Service

Iowa State University faced a slow, paper-based internal proposal and grant-approval process that handled nearly 2,000 proposals a year from about 1,200 investigators, with forms requiring 4–20 signatures and taking hours to days to complete. To modernize approvals and reduce wasted faculty time, Iowa State worked with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, deploying HP Process Automation along with eForms (implemented by integrator Binary Office) to replace the institutional proposal data form with an online, browser-accessed workflow.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise delivered HP Process Automation to create intelligent electronic PDFs, self-routing workflows, time-stamped electronic signatures, and SQL database integration, while Binary Office embedded business rules and university branding. The HPE solution eliminated much of the manual routing and chasing of approvals, enabled 24x7 access, improved status visibility and compliance checks, and is expected to deliver ROI in 1.5–2 years by saving about 2 hours of faculty time per application across ~2,000 annual proposals.

Iowa State University

Thane Peterson

Iowa State University