The University of Western Australia (UWA) is one of Australia’s leading research-intensive universities, serving thousands of graduate students pursuing advanced degrees.
The Thesis Examination team within UWA’s graduate research school coordinates the complex process of examining doctoral and master’s theses and manages communications among students, academic examiners, and internal stakeholders throughout each examination cycle.
The Challenge: Coordinating High-Stakes Examinations Across Multiple Platforms With Growing Risk
Before fully implementing Process Street, UWA’s Thesis Examination team faced a perfect storm of operational challenges. They were managing high-risk examination processes where any error could delay a student’s graduation, using disconnected Word documents, Excel spreadsheets that couldn’t be properly filtered, and manual copy-and-paste workflows across multiple platforms that didn’t communicate with each other.
The stakes were incredibly high. The team was coordinating oral examinations (vivas) that involved multiple parties: students, examiners, chairs, and administrative staff. Each examination required precise scheduling, timely reminders, accurate report tracking, and honorarium payment processing. With information stored in basic Word documents and Excel files used more like text documents than databases, the potential for human error was significant.
Then came the growth challenge. What started as 10 oral examinations in the first year exploded to 255 examinations by the previous year; a 2,450% increase. The team knew their manual processes wouldn’t scale, and they needed a systematic solution to maintain quality as they handled exponential growth.
How has Process Street helped you scale your examination processes?
“We started with probably 10 [viva examinations] in the first year. Last year, we had 255… The idea of scaling up was definitely a very big obstacle at the beginning… Process Street has helped us and supported us to deliver that level of service.”
The team inherited an elementary implementation of Process Street that was used solely as a checklist. While it helped track basic steps, it didn’t leverage automation, conditional logic, or integrated communications, so staff still spent hours downloading reports, manually comparing spreadsheets month-to-month, copying and pasting student information, and remembering which email templates to use for which stakeholders.
The Solution: Transforming a Basic Checklist Into an Intelligent Workflow Engine
Rather than abandoning Process Street or continuing with the status quo, Eleta and her team (particularly Examination Officer Mary Phan) embarked on a systematic evolution of their workflows, working closely with Process Street’s Customer Success team to unlock the platform’s full potential.
The transformation involved several key implementations:
Conditional Logic for Contextual Communications: The team replaced generic, combined email templates (where staff had to manually delete irrelevant sections) with conditional logic that automatically displayed the correct template based on examination type: online versus on-campus vivas, different stakeholder groups, and examination stages.
Dynamic Due Dates and Task Management: Instead of downloading monthly reports and manually reviewing each case in Excel, the team implemented dynamic due dates linked to examination dates. This meant reminders and follow-ups now appeared automatically in the “My Work” view when action was needed, eliminating the monthly one-hour spreadsheet review process.
Automated Honorarium Tracking: Previously, Mary would export spreadsheets monthly from another platform, filter results, and compare against the previous month to identify which examiners needed honorarium payment reminders. The team built an automation that triggers a dedicated honorarium workflow immediately when an examiner submits their report, eliminating manual exports and comparisons entirely.
Data Integration and Population: The team exports student and examiner information from the university nomination system as PDFs and uploads them into Process Street. Using text extraction and AI Tasks, the platform automatically parses the data and populates the relevant form fields. This removes manual re-entry, reduces errors, and speeds up each workflow run without requiring a direct system integration.
Comprehensive Workflow Coverage: The team expanded from basic viva scheduling to a complete examination lifecycle workflow, including: examiner nomination, scheduling coordination, preliminary report submission, student notification, pre-examination reminders, post-examination chair report processing, final thesis submission tracking, and workflow closure.
What impact has this had on your stakeholders?
“Exam examiners have come back to us saying that we’re so well organized. The information is all there… I think that’s sort of evident. Process Street has helped us and supported us to deliver that level of service.”
The implementation wasn’t just about technology; it was about partnership. The team emphasized that regular meetings with their Process Street Customer Success Manager, screen-sharing sessions to solve problems visually, and hands-on workflow building made the difference between basic usage and transformative results.
“Having a dedicated Process Street representative work through all these things with us 100 per cent made a difference.”
The Results: Measurable Time Savings, Zero Errors, and Examiner Praise
The transformation delivered concrete, quantifiable improvements across multiple dimensions:
- 50% reduction in task completion time: Individual viva scheduling tasks dropped from 10 minutes to 5 minutes due to automated template population and conditional logic
- 67% time savings on monthly follow-ups: Monthly examination follow-up tasks decreased from 60 minutes to approximately 20 minutes by eliminating manual report downloads and spreadsheet reviews
- Immediate honorarium processing: Switched from monthly batch processing (with manual spreadsheet exports and month-to-month comparisons) to instant automated triggers when examiners submit reports
- 2,450% volume scale: Successfully grew from 10 annual oral examinations to 255 without proportional staff increases
- Elimination of manual data comparison: Removed the need to compare current month spreadsheets against previous months for follow-up tracking
- Zero missed communications: Automated reminders ensure students, examiners, and chairs receive timely notifications without manual calendar tracking
- Enhanced handover capability: Managers can instantly filter tasks by team member and take over workflows when colleagues are on leave, without requiring detailed handovers
Beyond metrics, the quality improvements were equally significant. The team eliminated the combined email templates that required manual editing and deletion of irrelevant sections. They stopped manually typing stakeholder information for each communication, as data now populates automatically from earlier workflow inputs. The risk of human error, particularly in high-stakes examination contexts, dropped dramatically.
“We run things very smoothly like clockwork. These processes really help us, so we’re never struggling with our workload as much as everyone else because we try to use platforms like this.”
Perhaps most tellingly, the improvements became visible to external stakeholders. Examiners (academics who participate in thesis evaluations across multiple universities) began commenting on UWA’s organizational excellence.
The team also discovered unexpected use cases. Mary began creating ad hoc tasks in Process Street for daily handovers with her job-share colleague, ensuring nothing was missed without requiring end-of-day recap meetings. “My Work” in Process Street became the team’s single source of truth for daily priorities.
If someone in a similar situation asked about Process Street, how would you describe its impact?
“It has definitely impacted us in quite a significant way by really reducing errors, saving our time where we could use our time to do better things… Upper management and other people say that we run things very smoothly, like clockwork… These processes really help us. We’re never struggling with our workload as much as everyone else because we try to use this platform.”
From Examination Excellence to University-Wide Transformation
The Thesis Examination team’s success with Process Street has positioned the solution for broader organizational impact. Following a demonstration to other UWA operational teams, at least one additional team expressed strong interest in implementing similar workflows for their processes.
With a university-wide operational restructuring planned for January 2026 that merges previously siloed teams for admissions, candidature, and examinations into a single integrated operations team, the Process Street workflows are poised to expand across the entire student lifecycle. The team envisions building backwards from their current end-of-lifecycle examination workflows to include earlier stages, such as intention-to-submit tracking and enrollment processes.
“Now we’re at the tail end of the student life cycle, we’re going to slowly expand it all the way to the beginning,” Eleta explained, noting that while full integration between UWA’s systems and Process Street may be years away, the incremental expansion of automated workflows will continue delivering efficiency gains and error reduction across graduate research operations.
The University of Western Australia’s journey demonstrates that successful process automation isn’t just about implementing technology; it’s about evolving usage over time, partnering with solution providers who invest in customer success, and building a culture that recognizes systematic process improvement as the foundation for scaling quality service delivery.
Operational discipline drives academic excellence.
Power complex university operations with Process Street.
Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Amazon Bedrock, Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis. Process Street serves as the intelligent orchestration layer, where AWS AI services power the advanced reasoning and data processing that turns policies into workflows, and then enables workflow automations, intelligent document processing, and reasoning. Specifically, ProcessStreet’s GenAI capabilities are used to ensure that customers’ policies align with their workflows and that change governance mechanisms control how tasks are updated to achieve compliance in an automated manner. This creates a closed-loop system where AI directly triggers and guides actionable workflows
The post How The University of Western Australia Scaled Thesis Examinations by 2,450% first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
0 Commentaires