As you know, we’re always on the lookout for stories about how people use FormAssembly to help their organization.

Today, let’s take a closer look at how Dominican University builds web forms to save time and resources and increase productivity all around.

How Dominican University uses web forms

At the beginning of the semester, the IT department at Dominican University was tasked with coming up with an efficient way to manage and issue parking permits. Just to give you an idea, the University predicted that they would need to give out at least 3,000 parking permits to students throughout the school year.

They were using paper forms, which meant that students had to wait in a long line that would take up to an hour and a half… just to get their parking permits!

They knew that something needed to change — and fast.

Adam Smeets, Director of University Information Systems at Dominican University, said that he knew exactly what they needed to do to alleviate this pain. The solution? He introduced an alternative approach using FormAssembly to the team, and in no time they were building web forms to process and manage all that data.

Here’s a screenshot of the parking permit web form that was created to accomplish this:

Now, issuing parking permits is much easier for both the students, staff and faculty at Dominican University.

Here’s how the process now works: A requestor can open the web form, authenticate, fill out the parking permit form, and then the data is automatically sent to the school’s support team with a series of triggers.

They are now able to fill out everything they need online in order to receive their parking permits from the comfort of home. On these web forms, individuals can enter their license plate number, insurance, and other necessary information. Now when requesters go to pick up their permits at the University, Support Center staff are able to then pull up all of this data by simply entering an ID number.

This process has successfully helped reduce what used to be a 1 1/2 hour wait down to 5 minutes max.

In addition to parking permit forms, Dominican University uses web forms for a variety of different purposes: to manage travel requests for faculty, as well as creating guest access forms for visitors who would like to request access to the school’s network.

Integrations

Dominican University utilizes many different integrations, but the ones they most commonly use are Salesforce and Drupal.

The Salesforce integration makes it easy for them to process admissions information, while Drupal makes it easy for other departments (like the marketing team) to create and edit forms on the fly.

Keeping data safe

Adam and his team feel most comfortable using FormAssembly to collect data, as they frequently process confidential student information.

“For example, students who want to apply to be teaching assistants in the classroom — that data needs to be secure. With FormAssembly, security is clearly defined and protected, specifically with the data we’re collecting and storing,” said Adam.

“And it doesn’t require us to spend hours turning around a form. We can do it all very easily and with confidence.”

The results

After implementing the forms, they’ve been happy with the feedback they’ve received. Even students have given their feedback and have said that the university’s web forms are simple and easy to use.

“We’re thrilled that they’re getting the information they need in a timely fashion resulting in faster, and accurate, decisions and outcomes,” Adam said.

Plus, the faculty are very happy with FormAssembly and they plan on making it the go-to solution for data collection. “We’re in the process of moving all of our web forms over to FormAssembly.”

Do you have a story to share?

Is your organization using FormAssembly in a creative way? Is it making your life easier? We’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment with us below or tweet with us @FormAssembly.