Automation Case Studies

Department: Enrolment Services

Problem

Admissions staff manually transcribe course codes, grades, and institution names from student transcripts into UBC's applicant systems — a time-intensive process prone to data-entry errors. Transcript formats vary significantly across high school and post-secondary institutions, and delays in grade entry slow downstream advising, prerequisite checks, and transfer credit evaluations.

What the bot does

Using Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and RPA, the automation ingests PDF and image-format transcripts, classifies them by type (high school or post-secondary), extracts course and grade data via OCR, applies institution-specific normalization rules, validates the output, and routes exceptions to a human-in-the-loop review queue before writing clean data to the student record.

Key capabilities

Department: Enrolment Services

Problem

Workday's nightly recalculation process does not reliably pick up all sponsor contracts requiring recalculation, creating gaps that require daily manual staff intervention. Additionally, students have very limited visibility into their own sponsor contract details in Workday — a visibility gap that previously required staff to manually run and distribute reports on request.

What the bot does

The automation runs the student sponsor contract report in Workday and uploads the resulting PDF directly to each student's Workday Student Documents, making it accessible to students at any time without staff involvement. A second component addresses the recalculation gap by triggering the process for contracts that the nightly job misses.

Key capabilities

Department: Finance · Payroll

Problem

When a Workday costing allocation is retroactively changed, a Payroll Accounting Adjustment (PAA) must be created to reallocate costs to the correct worktags. Volumes reached ~5,000 entries per month on average — spiking to ~12,000 — and backlogs stretched up to three months due to the entirely manual, multi-step process.

What the bot does

The attended bot reads a PAA report, applies earnings logic including a yellow/black list, checks for inactive worktags (grants, programs, projects, gifts, cost centres), handles salary prorations, and posts validated adjustments directly into Workday — with error handling and a recovery assistant for edge cases.

Key capabilities

Department: Enrolment Services

Problem

Following IRCC's January 2024 announcement of a cap on international study permits, every new application required a Provincial Attestation Letter issued by UBC within a tight deadline. Enrolment Services did not have the staffing to produce PALs at the required volume and turnaround — putting thousands of incoming students' fall enrollment at risk.

What the bot does

The attended bot reads a list of student numbers from an Excel file, looks up each student's name, address, date of birth, and country via the Admissions API, logs into the BC government's PAL web application using the staff member's own credentials, creates and populates a new attestation for each student, downloads the completed PDF, and notifies the operator when the run is complete.

Key capabilities

Department: Faculty of Science · Math · CS

Problem

When a student successfully enrolled in a course section, they were not automatically removed from waitlists for other sections of the same course. During peak registration periods this created manual cleanup work across multiple faculties and left waitlist positions incorrectly occupied.

What the bot does

A dispatcher bot identifies students who have enrolled in a course and still appear on waitlists for other sections of that course. A performer bot then removes them from those waitlists, with optional per-course email notifications to students. The workflow integrates with UBC's Permissions API, Academic API, Notification Service, and Workday.

Key capabilities

Department: Enrolment Services

Problem

UBC's Degree Navigator system license was expiring in December 2025. All student Program Requirement Reports needed to be exported and preserved in SharePoint before the system went offline — a task that would have required manual generation of a PDF for every student in the system.

What the bot does

The bot reads a provided list of student records, logs into Degree Navigator, generates the Program Requirement Report PDF for each available program per student, creates a per-student folder structure, saves all PDFs to a central OneDrive location, and produces a run log for every file processed.

Key capabilities

Department: Enrolment Services

Problem

IRCC requires Canadian post-secondary institutions to verify the Letter of Acceptance a student submits with their study permit application. Verifying each LOA manually across multiple UBC systems was time-consuming, with peak volumes running from May through July each year.

What the bot does

The unattended bot reads LOA data, accesses the appropriate UBC systems based on the information in each letter, performs the verification steps required by IRCC, and records the outcome — replacing a manual lookup-and-confirm workflow that staff previously completed one record at a time.

Key capabilities

Department: Finance · Accounts Payable

Problem

Every payment to an external party — regardless of dollar value or frequency — required a full supplier setup and a complete Workday invoice and approval workflow, averaging 30 minutes of staff time per transaction. During the 2021/22 fiscal year, over 12,600 suppliers were paid only once, representing a significant volume of low-complexity transactions absorbing high-complexity process overhead.

What the bot does

The unattended bot runs a series of compliance validations on each payment request. If none are flagged, it creates a Miscellaneous Payee and generates a payment transaction in Workday, ready for a FinOps team member to review and release for settlement — bypassing the full supplier setup process for eligible one-time payments.

Key capabilities