How Enfuse Group and De Montfort University are driving digital change in higher education

25 October 2024 Consultancy.uk

Enfuse Group has closely partnered with De Montfort University to help the institution deliver some key transformational work. The work has been on-going since the autumn of 2023, and has helped to embed new software in the university, to evaluate and improve key HR processes.

Universities are continually looking for ways in which to do more with less and continue to provide the best possible experience for both staff and students, catering to changing expectations in the aftermath of the global Covid pandemic. One of the ways this can be done is through improving key processes and implementing new technology with enhanced functionality.

Amid this, De Montfort University (DMU) has been actively partnering with Enfuse Group, a consultancy specialising in digital transformation. Working with DMU, Enfuse has played a key role in a number of key implementations of technology, to ensure it can quickly derive real value from its technology investments.

In particular, the engagement has focused on getting the most from the university’s adoption of SAP Signavio, a process management tool for driving business transformation, through the successful execution of a proof-of-concept initiative in HR and the maturing of in-house process capabilities. Speaking in an interview with Enfuse Group, Tracey Jessup, chief transformational officer at DMU, explained, that the firm’s prowess with Signavio was among the main reasons she contacted them in the first place.

“Enfuse Group had mapped out a really good way of using the Signavio tool to start to give you some of the data points to answer some of those questions,” Jessup recalled. “They weren't going to just be focusing on what extra products should we buy, what extra modules of Signavio should we buy. Their knowledge meant they always had a focus on what improvement could we make to prove value with investment we'd already made.”

To fully understand where improvements could be made, Enfuse Group set about modelling and simulating DMU’s recruitment cycle end-to-end. The hope was that the consultants could highlight processes to be optimised through the removal of pain points, clarification of responsibilities, updates to system functionality and other process inefficiencies.

Jessup expanded, “They looked into many questions. What are the processes that we need to change? Where are the efficiencies that we could gain? And how do we want to work with our HR colleagues who use the system every day? Also as importantly, how do we want to work with all those hiring managers across the university?”

This initiative identified a number of improvements to realise value immediately through process improvement in in HR, while outlining the specific requirements needed from a new system which was being procured by the department. Once the ‘as-is’ was documented, it was cross-referenced with the vanilla configuration to-be processes in the new system. A business decision was the required from the client to choose whether to adopt these best practice to-be models, which would significantly change ways of working internally, or to define a customisation requirement for the new system. Where a decision was made to adopt best practice from the to-be models a detailed change plan was created to mitigate against a failed system implementation., Through the use of a blended team to execute this work, Enfuse were able to successfully build internal capabilities at DMU and reported that “a new culture and approach to continuous improvement has been embedded at the university.”

Looking ahead, the success of this initial proof of concept and Signavio implementation has meant that work has now been undertaken by Enfuse to connect Signavio Process Insights to DMU's SAP finance environment. This module of Signavio will help to provide “live system data monitoring and customised process improvement suggestions”, which Enfuse contends will be “the first ever successful implementation of the module at a UK higher education client”. Meanwhile, as DMU looks to continue to adapt to the state of the UK’s higher education sector, their focus for future work will turn to moving core business areas off of legacy systems that are falling out of support in the coming years, and they will look to Signavio as a key technology to drive successful transitions as the business evolves.

Commenting on the work so far, Jessup concluded, “What I would say to colleagues and other universities is, Enfuse have got a really good way to help you explore what in your own context might be the most valuable things for you to do. We're complex organisations doing multifaceted things, and sometimes in such organisations the effort and the time it takes to understand processes and the efficiencies you can get from processes is actually really high. And Enfuse can probably help you do that in an easier, more simple way. Enfuse put a really big emphasis on providing value to us and that was actually hugely important.”

Looking back on the experience, Caitlin Thomas, a manager at Enfuse who led the engagement, noted that the work had been “an incredibly rewarding journey”.

She added, “Our initial engagement to embed SAP Signavio as a transformational tool within their HR processes not only uncovered critical pain points and brought some clarity through data simulations, but it also laid the groundwork for a new culture of continuous improvement at the university. The collaborative transformation suite is now utilised daily by their continuous improvement team while also being leveraged to provide performance and benchmarking data for other system transformations as the University look to optimise their Finance processes and systems."