How Gettysburg College launched 100 applications in just six months - and built a scalable approach to campus-wide process improvement

Faced with growing financial pressures, unfilled positions, and increasing demands on staff, Gettysburg College knew that simply asking employees to do more wasn’t sustainable. The institution needed a smarter way to reduce administrative work while maintaining the high-quality service its students, faculty, and staff expect.

In this on-demand webinar, leaders from Gettysburg College share how they used Kuali Build to modernize processes, empower employees, and create more consistent, connected workflows across campus

The Challenge

Doing More Without Asking Employees to Absorb More

Like many higher education institutions, Gettysburg College was facing growing financial and staffing pressures. Over six years, nearly 80 vacant positions had gone unfilled, leaving remaining employees to manage increasing workloads while continuing to deliver excellent service. Many campus processes still relied on paper forms, spreadsheets, email chains, manual data entry, and knowledge held by individual employees. These disconnected processes created bottlenecks, introduced errors, limited visibility, and made it difficult to maintain consistency across departments.

Gettysburg needed a sustainable way to eliminate wasted effort, preserve institutional knowledge, and create capacity - without reducing the quality of service provided to students, faculty, and campus partners.

The Solution

A Campus-Wide Approach to Process Improvement

Gettysburg College adopted Kuali Build as part of a broader process improvement initiative designed to help departments identify inefficiencies and develop practical solutions. Using a deliberate “crawl, walk, run” strategy, the college started small, demonstrated value, and expanded adoption as employees gained confidence. A hands-on certification program trained nontechnical employees to build and maintain their own applications, while IT provided governance, integrations, and strategic support.

With Kuali Build, departments can replace manual processes with digital forms and automated workflows, prepopulate trusted information from institutional systems, and route requests to the right people. This distributed approach empowers the employees closest to each process while allowing IT to serve as a strategic partner instead of a development bottleneck.

The Results

Faster Development. Broader Impact.

Gettysburg College launched 100 applications in its first six months. Within two years, the institution had deployed more than 285 Kuali Build applications across academic and administrative units. The college has also created more than 100 integrations with systems including PeopleSoft and OnBase, enabling applications to retrieve trusted information and write approved data back to institutional systems. Twenty-five nontechnical employees have been trained and certified to develop applications, expanding the college’s capacity for continuous improvement.

• Launched 100 applications in just six months

• Deployed more than 285 applications within two years

• Created more than 100 integrations with institutional systems

• Trained and certified 25 nontechnical application builders

• Reduced application development time from weeks to hours

• Replaced paper forms, spreadsheets, and email-based processes

• Improved data accuracy, process visibility, and consistency

• Expanded workflow automation across HR, finance, risk management, academics, and student services

Why Kuali
A Platform That Empowers the Entire Campus

For Gettysburg College, Kuali Build is more than a form and workflow tool—it is a productivity multiplier. The platform enables departments to improve the processes they understand best while giving IT the oversight needed to protect institutional data and maintain effective governance. Applications that could take two to three weeks to develop in the college’s ERP can often be created in Kuali Build in just two to three hours. Departments can respond to changing needs more quickly, maintain their own workflows, and continually improve how work gets done.

By combining accessible no-code tools, connected institutional data, and a strong community of campus builders, Gettysburg has created a scalable foundation for a more agile - and increasingly agentic - campus.