Students at Merton College can book rooms for events from individual study sessions to large scale social events and talks. Each booking requires approval from various members of the College depending on the specific request. All bookings are managed by the events team who processed around 1,600 emails per term relating to booking rooms.
Historically students would email their requests and the process of seeking approval involved significant levels of manual checking and correspondence with a range of individuals.
Wanting to improve the process for all parties, the events team at Merton College approached the Workflow and Automation Competency Centre for support. The competency centre exists to support staff from across the collegiate university to streamline and automate their processes.
The competency centre worked closely with the team to map the existing process and then proposed a new process including a Microsoft Form feeding into Power Automate, Microsoft’s tool for automating data and tasks.
The new system has reduced the need for manual updates, improved accuracy and made the process more efficient. The process is much quicker, and email traffic has gone down significantly as the whole process is managed within Teams, making it quick and easy for staff to manage. Data is handled more effectively, and the result is a better experience for students and staff.
The new form collects all necessary booking information, reducing the need for follow-up emails. The process detects if requests are made at least 14 days in advance in line with the College’s policy and automates rejections for non-compliant requests. Approved requests are sent to the events team, who assigns a risk level before being automatically sent to the relevant college members for approval, modification or rejection.
The events team can easily view an overview of room bookings, and students are automatically emailed with booking confirmations, rejections, or specific booking parameters.
Louis Gilmour, Automation Developer from the Workflow and Automation Competency Centre said: “One of the things I really like with this project, is that if a student asks to use a room, but it’s unavailable, it’s easy to offer them another room that suits. We’ve included steps in the process that automatically remove the people who needed to approve the old room, and add the people required to approve the new room, making the process as smooth and simple as possible, even when there are additional steps like this.”
