Enhancing Faculty Promotion CyclesElectronic Faculty Position Management Technology

William Beaumont School of MedicineOakland University

CASE STUDY | 2

Enhancing The Faculty Promotion Cycle viaElectronic Faculty Position Management

TechnologySmartPath™ Faculty Lifecycle Management Software reduces time and expenses while eliminating paper from the faculty

promotion process.

Goals» Automate faculty promotion processes to prepare the Oakland

University William Beaumont School of Medicine (OUWB) for apromotion cycle of over 600 eligible faculty.

» Reduce manual data entry, use of inefficient shadow IT processes andincoming status request phone calls to Faculty Affairs.

» Decrease costs of printing, copying and transporting paper PromotionApplication Dossiers (casebooks) within the School of Medicine and tocommittee members throughout the region.

Solutions» Streamline promotion cycle workflows and reduce manual process

inefficiencies.

» Enable intuitive, direct data entry to reduce errors and increase first-time data integrity.

» Implement a completely electronic workflow for compiling, distributing, reviewing and reporting faculty information.

Results

Established: 2010Students Enrolled: 400Teaching Faculty: 1,462Location: Rochester, MI

Reduced call volumes

Saved $10,000/Year on Promotion Casebook Printing, Copying and

Shipping

$10K$10K

Eliminated Spreadsheets

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The Challenge

In preparation for the largest round of faculty promotions in the school’s history, the Faculty Affairs team at the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine (OUWB) knew they needed to overhaul their inefficient paper-based promotion processes.

With over 600 faculty members eligible for promotion, OUWB needed intelligent faculty management software capable of organizing faculty data and facilitating the upcoming promotion requests, reviews and approvals.

OUWB Goes PaperlessFor many medical schools, a paperless faculty promotion process is a far-fetched dream. For OUWB, it’s a reality.

Before SmartPath, OUWB’s Faculty Affairs department wasted valuable time, resources, materials and money on printing, copying, assembling, mailing, hand-delivering and storing tens of thousands of pages of faculty CVs and forms during each promotion cycle.

Materials and staff-hours for manual paper-based promotion processes can cost medical schools similar to OUWB approximately $10,000 per year. And that’s just the promotion cycle. Factor in the resources used to appoint, re-appoint, evaluate and tenure faculty throughout their careers, and the costs escalate quickly.

Instead of printing promotion casebooks and lugging them around campus and across the region to reviewing committee members, OUWB’s Faculty Affairs team now automates casebook distribution and review processes using SmartPath. No printing, no copying, no mailing.

Committee members review all faculty promotion casebooks in the SmartPath system from their desktop, laptop or tablet wherever and whenever their schedules permit.

The Solution

SmartPath by Mountain Pass is a comprehensive faculty position management suite helping higher education faculty affairs and HR departments optimize workflows and increase efficiency.

Career Events Tenure Onboard

Appoint

Credential

Enroll

Evaluate

Promote

Faculty Dashboard

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Management in the Cloud

Medical schools often track faculty appointments, credentials, evaluations and promotions in lengthy Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets and store paper forms and promotion casebooks in large rooms filled to the ceiling with boxes of binders. OUWB was no different.

Before SmartPath, Faculty Affairs was tracking all faculty demographic information, CV content, appointments, reappointments and terminations in one massive Excel spreadsheet. With over 1,400 rows—one for each faculty member—and 44 columns of data, there was no efficient way to search, order or group faculty or verify data integrity.

SmartPath will eliminate OUWB’s shadow IT systems and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets from the promotion process by moving faculty management to the Cloud.

9 Increased Data Reliability

SmartPath replicated OUWB’s paper forms online so faculty can enter their own information in a recognizable format. One-time data entry ensures the information submitted by the original source is not copied, pasted or re-entered incorrectly.

9 Empowered Faculty Affairs Staff

With never-before-seen efficiency gains, Faculty Affairs personnel are freed from the phone and copy machine to address more significant professional development and faculty affairs initiatives.

“My employees are no longer coming to me with problems;

they’re coming to me with solutions. SmartPath is so intuitive. The

dashboard delivers important faculty information at a glance, with the complete roster, faculty

data and status updates accessible in just a few intuitive clicks.”

Deirdre Pitts, MAOM, IPMA-SCP Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs & Professional Development Oakland University William Beaumont School of

Medicine

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“SmartPath was by far the most phenomenal option available. No other company could match the

Mountain Pass team’s knowledge of the academic process. We didn’t

have to waste valuable time bringing them up to speed on

medical school workflow. They already knew it as well as we did.

The choice was easy; it was SmartPath or nothing.”

Deirdre Pitts, MAOM, IPMA-SCP Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs & Professional Development Oakland University William Beaumont School of

Medicine

Anytime, Anywhere Access for AllOUWB needed a faculty management solution that everyone involved in the promotion process could access when and where it was most convenient.

Faculty Affairs staff, reviewing committees and faculty members can log into SmartPath remotely using any Internet-connected device and intuitively navigate the dashboard with minimal to no training.

OUWB’s Faculty Affairs department, committee members and faculty now enjoy timesaving efficiencies with SmartPath.

9 Faculty Affairs staff send promotion casebooks, look upinformation, pull faculty roster reports and instantly see the promotion status of all faculty members from their desks. No running to the printer, copy machine or storage room. No tracking down the latest version of the Excel file. No running across campus or across town to deliver casebooks.

9 Assistant Dean and Manager of Faculty Affairs oversee faculty data at a glance on the SmartPath dashboardand quickly pull reports and metrics from the entire faculty roster or a subset of faculty data for LCME and other reporting requirements.

9 Reviewing committees comprised of busy physicians, deans and department chairs sign into SmartPath ontheir iPads, laptops or desktops from any location to review faculty promotion casebooks as their schedules permit. With an iPad or laptop, reviewing committees bring all casebooks to the office, across the country, and to committee meetings without lugging 500 pages of paper along with them.

9 Faculty members log into the SmartPath dashboard at any time for a completely transparent view of theirpromotion status. Faculty members eligible for promotion now see important due dates, material submission confirmations and status updates so they can confidently move through the promotion process without calling Faculty Affairs for help.

Unmatched Academic ExpertiseWith a large number of faculty eligible for promotion, OUWB needed a faculty data management system that could make an impact on day one. Of equal importance to the software component was the Mountain Pass team’s proficiency in streamlining medical school higher education workflow—experience other software providers could not replicate.

The Mountain Pass team started optimizing OUWB’s faculty management workflows even before implementing SmartPath. Because faculty affairs experts were integral in creating the software, it is designed to solve workflow challenges inherent to higher education without expensive add-ons or reconfigurations.

Mountain Pass helped OUWB eliminate unnecessary steps in the promotion process to maximize the timesaving impact of SmartPath.

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What’s Next?With SmartPath now efficiently guiding OUWB through faculty promotions, the Faculty Affairs team is focusing on implementing SmartPath in its other faculty management processes.

9 Onboard Ensure candidates and faculty create all CVs in the same format with the same fields.

9 AppointIdentify the required documents for each position to be filled and compile a comprehensive step-by-step checklist.

9 Career Events & Tenure Create one resource for the entire faculty lifecycle to capture CVs, start dates, publications, evaluations, promotions and more.

“The whole School of Medicine is excited about SmartPath. Every week somebody from Student

Affairs, a faculty member or an associate dean comes by my office and says, ‘Can we have

SmartPath do this? Are we able to get SmartPath?’ Departments throughout the University could

absolutely benefit from an online process.”

Janine DeWitte, PHR Manager of Faculty Affairs & Professional Development Oakland University

William Beaumont School of Medicine

About Mountain Pass

Mountain Pass Solutions is an emerging leader of Software Automation solutions for Faculty Lifecycle Management in the Higher Education marketplace. With State of the Art software, Mountain Pass provides solutions that eliminate manual, mundane tasks that often plague Faculty Affairs Management during the Appointment, Promotion and Tenure Management Lifecycle process.

To request a demo, visit: www.GoMountainPass.com/demo

Mountain Pass Solutions, Inc. PO Box 130206

Ann Arbor, MI 48109(866) 224-9050

info@GoMountainPass.com www.GoMountainPass.com