Northwestern Health Sciences University saves over 4,000 hours a year by automating manual tasks

About the company

Northwestern Health Sciences University is a private university in Bloomington, Minnesota, founded in 1941. It offers 12 healthcare programs, including chiropractic, acupuncture and Chinese medicine, massage therapy, radiation therapy, radiological technology, and undergraduate health sciences. There are approximately 130 faculty members and 1,200 students across their undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs.

Automating syllabus compliance tracking

Each term, students are required to complete a syllabus acknowledgement in every course they're enrolled in. If they don't, they're automatically dropped. The rule ensures students have engaged with the course before the drop deadline and have read the syllabus. It also catches students who forgot to drop a course or forgot they had registered for a course. This protects the student and ensures compliance with financial aid requirements.

Identifying students that hadn't completed the acknowledgement before the deadline meant checking activity data in the LMS against enrollment records in the student information system, one course section and one student at a time, across more than 450 course sections and over 6,500 course enrollments

Blanket reminder emails to the entire student body didn't help with completion. Students who had already completed the task ignored them, and before long everyone else did too. But sending personalized reminder emails manually for this volume of course enrollments simply wasn't possible. Even tracking completion needed a better solution.

Christopher Petrie, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Data Strategy at the university, and his team built a set of flows in Zoho Flow to solve this. The flows sync completion data from Canvas and Moodle, the university's two learning management systems, into tracking tables in Zoho Analytics.

Canvas is the harder of the two to reach: It runs as a hosted cloud service with no direct database access, so the flows pull course and completion data out through its API using custom Deluge functions and load it into Analytics automatically. Moodle is synced to Analytics through direct database access.

This provided a clean and easy way to track completion for the registrar's office, but it didn't solve the completion problem. To do that, additional flows were built to notify students that the acknowledgement wasn't complete.

Once a day, as the deadline approaches, the flow identifies every student with an incomplete acknowledgement in a specific course and sends them a personalized reminder that greets the student by name and identifies the specific course and other details. This isn't a generic nudge but a message that says exactly which class is the problem, exactly how many days are left, and the consquences for non-completion. The reminders go out daily in the final days before the deadline, including a countdown. On the due date itself, one last flow sends a final notice if the task is still incomplete. Only students with incomplete acknowledgements are notified and only for the specific courses that are incomplete.

The incompletion rate at the deadline has dropped from roughly 25% to under 1%. Unintended drops went from over 50 a term to zero, and the registrar's office no longer chases students down to find out whether they actually intended to leave. The result is a much better user experience for students and a significantly streamlined process for the registrar's office, all with greater compliance.

Automating assessment data and performance tracking

The university also collects hundreds of assessment submissions every week across more than a dozen forms built in Zoho Forms. All of that data needs to reach Zoho Analytics for aggregation and reporting.

Before automation, each form had to be exported to CSV, cleaned up, checked for errors, and manually uploaded into Analytics, form by form. It took several hours each week, and whenever someone was busy or out of the office, the uploads waited. Faculty and students were left without real-time access to assessment data and results. Flows were built to fully automate this process.

Now, when an assessment form is submitted through Zoho Forms, the data is automatically cleaned and placed in the correct table in Zoho Analytics. The same flows check whether a student is performing below remediation thresholds set by faculty. If so, they create a remediation tracking entry and send email notifications to the relevant staff. A separate flow checks back after additional assessment data is submitted to see if the student's performance has climbed above the threshold and if so, it closes the remediation record automatically. Nobody has to remember to open a case or to close one.

Faculty and students now see real-time results on their Analytics dashboards without waiting on anyone to run an upload, and students who need academic support surface as the data arrives rather than being spotted weeks later.

"The clinical flows have been huge for the student experience. Students can see where they stand in their clinical education within a very short time of submitting, and the remediation tracking runs itself, from flagging a student who's struggling to closing it out once they've recovered."

Christopher Petrie, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Data Strategy, Northwestern Health Sciences University

Giving students a live view of their clinical progress

Students in the clinical programs log the patient encounters they complete, and there can be a lot of them. Rather than filling out a fresh form for every patient, a student records a day's worth at once: one submission, with a sub-form for each encounter. A student who saw 15 patients enters their details once and adds 15 encounters underneath, instead of submitting the same form 15 times.

From there, Zoho Flow takes over. It pulls in the student's details, builds a row for each encounter, and loads them into Zoho Analytics in bulk. If anything fails along the way, the dean gets an email flagging exactly what to check. A student sees their clinical work reflected on their Analytics dashboard within minutes of submitting, not days later.

The same performance data drives the institution's remediation tracking, and Flow manages that from start to finish. When a student's results fall below the thresholds faculty have set, a flow opens a remediation record and notifies the staff who need to know. Later, another flow checks back: If the student's performance has climbed above the threshold, it closes the remediation out on its own and notes the assessment data that brought them back above threshold.

Connecting systems across campus

Beyond assessments, the team has applied the same approach across campus, using custom Deluge functions to connect systems and sync data between them.

Chris describes custom functions as the single most important feature in Zoho Flow for the university. They let the team build API interactions with any system, which is especially valuable in education, where many institutional platforms use specialized APIs. Custom functions also extend what the native connectors do. With Zoho Analytics, for example, the team uses custom functions for API calls for bulk data imports and exporting results from query tables, capabilities now currently supported in the native connector.

Benefits and ROI

More than 140 flows now keep systems that were never designed to work together in sync: two learning management systems, a student information system, Zoho Forms, and Zoho Analytics. Together they save more than 4,000 hours of manual work a year while also providing a superior user experience for students that wouldn't be possible to do manually. Building the initial flows took Chris 20–30 hours with additional refinement over time. That time was invested once and now pays dividends each time the flows are used.

"Using Zoho Flow has helped us save over 4,000 hours annually. It has also helped our students plan their courses better. Where earlier we had over 50 drops per semester, now it's almost zero. And syllabus incompletion rate has also dropped to under 1% from 25%."

Christopher Petrie, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Data Strategy, Northwestern Health Sciences University

Wrongful course drops fell from about 50 a term to zero, and the incompletion rate at the syllabus deadline dropped from roughly 25% to under 1%. Assessment results reach Analytics on their own instead of through hours of weekly cleanup, and students who need academic support get flagged automatically as their data arrives. The team built each of those flows themselves, with no implementation partner involved.

Moving forward

With their core workflows running reliably, Chris and his team keep finding more to automate. They regularly receive requests from teams within the university looking to explore automations in Zoho Flow and streamline work. They also continue to expand integrations between systems using Zoho Flow as the integration layer using custom functions. The goal is to improve the user/student experience and provide faculty and staff with more time to do what they do best by automating menial tasks and integrating systems across the institution.