---

ProDig@Students

Duration
2017 – 2021

Contact
Prof. Dr. Stefan Sackmann

Project Team
Johannes Damarowsky
Project and Process Manager, development of teaching content

Kai Raschke
System Architect & IT Business Process Engineer

Hans Betke
Process Engineer

Initial Situation
In the teaching canon of business information systems, business process management (BPM) is highly relevant for students of business administration, business information systems and computer science. In teaching, the application of learned methods has so far been practised with fictitious case studies, which cannot fully reflect the multi-layeredness and complexity of real processes.

The students are themselves affected by real business processes (processes in the university administration, e.g. examination office, enrolment). They are confronted with overworked staff, long waiting times, non-transparent processes or unclear processing statuses.

Objectives
The project aimed to address and solve both problem areas. Within the framework of project seminars, students digitised real processes from university administration and optimised them step by step.

Procedure
The IT infrastructure of the project was built around the workflow management system Camunda. The examination office of the economics department initially acted as a practical partner. The primary goal of the digitalisation was the process for registering theses.

The teaching canon for the business process management modules in the Bachelor's and Master's degrees were redesigned to use the contents of the project. In the summer semester, a three-day block seminar and workshop was developed for Bachelor's students to intensively practise the recording, modelling and implementation of processes with the students. In the winter semester, process mining tools were used and analyses and optimisations were deepened on the anonymised process logs of the project.

Later in the project, the transferability of the processes and IT infrastructure to other organisational units of the university was examined and discussed with the examination offices of the other faculties, for example.

Results
The process for registering theses at the Faculty of Economic Sciences was transferred to the university's examination portal "Löwenportal" and the process was completely digitalised. At the same time, ensuring that the chairs could use different levels of digitisation of the process depending on their interests.

The content developed for teaching is still being used and well regarded among students.

The project was an important lighthouse in the university's digitisation strategy and effectively demonstrated how modern lightweight workflow management systems can connect heterogeneous IT systems and digitise processes.

Zum Seitenanfang