Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi knew that to first correct a problem and Leveraged Opportunities, you must first understand what they are. Over the years, as the number of students grew and the programmes changed , the team knew the processes for handling new student enquiries and enrolments across the institute had grown organically. They also knew that you don't get many chances at converting student enquiries into full-time students, and if you get it wrong you may not end up with that student enrolling. Although there were some great processes in places, and room for improvement in others, they needed a clear objective view on how the enquiry and enrolment processes were 'actually' functioning. Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi engaged Business Mechanix to work alongside them on capturing, mapping and formalising the enrolment process, and in turn to help build robust processes to improve their current communication and response times to the enquiring student.
Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi had enquiries coming in directly to staff which could have been handled any number of ways. Prospective student information was then sent to various departments for further processing. During the process capture, it was found that the enquiry was sent back to the departments anything from 1-5 times before the prospective enquiry was formally responded to. This caused delays in prospective students receiving information packs and occasionally resulted in enquiry information being missed placed. As a result of working with Business Mechanix, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi recognized this problem, found immediate benefit in the process mapping exercise and immediately set about changed the process, before Business Mechanix even had time for the ink to dry on the completed process diagrams!
The streamlining of these processes ultimately allowed Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi to make sure it was responding to as man prospective students as possible in the shortest time and to ensure students were enrolled onto Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi courses. Business Mechanix was then engaged to further map out the processes involved in enrolling prospective students, to further enhance and help the quest to improving the student experience and to increase student number.