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Western Governors University Realizes 80% Savings with Active Endpoints Business Process Management System

Western Governors University (WGU) is an online university that has grown from 3,000 to 19,000 students in the last five years. They were challenged by the inefficiency of their student change management process, such as frequently changing the elements of their degree programs and adding new options for them. For example, each time a degree program was changed or a student decided to change to a different program, the administrative office had to complete a series of manual processes to make the change. The entire process was taking up to 4 hours, was error prone and difficult to scale as new students enrolled.

The President of the university decided to improve the IT infrastructure in order to support their significant growth. Based on this goal, the IT department decided on the following high priority requirements:

• Standards-based: They wanted to avoid "vendor lock-in" and its high costs.
• Price: They wanted a reasonably priced standards-based BPM system that would allow it to experiment with a service-based architecture. Justifying a seven figure BPM solution did not make sense.
• Ease-of-Use: They wanted design tools that were user friendly, eliminated the need to write code every time a process was changed, and did not require a Java developer.

Based on these requirements, all BPM tools based on proprietary technology were eliminated. The finalists were JBoss jBPM, a custom code JAVA-based solution, and ActiveVOS. The custom JAVA solution was eliminated because it was too time consuming and only "one-off" code. JBoss jBPM was eliminated because it required too much coding.

The outcome for WGU is compelling:

• It reduced WGU's student program change management process by 80% (4 hours to 48 minutes).
• It saved an estimated $450,000 per year in reduced labor costs.
• It improved efficiencies by improving record accuracy and reliability, and reducing manual processing.
• It successfully implemented a serviced-oriented business process application, enabling change to occur more rapidly using ActiveVOS's model-driven approach than possible using competing solutions WGU evaluated.
• It established an IT infrastructure for the future that could develop, deploy, and integrate more dynamic applications with a limited investment.

David Reflexia, Senior Software Architect said, "We're already expanding what we've done in the first project and will be using it for other business processes." He continued, "Building a BPM solution using ActiveVOS Designer is faster than building it in almost any other language."

Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints, Inc. said, "We've had great success attracting customers that are moving away from expensive, proprietary BPM." He continued, "Western Governors University is an excellent example of how customers benefit from ActiveVOS's ease-of-use to quickly deliver service-oriented business process applications at an affordable price that meet today's and future business and technology needs."

A more detailed case study is available at www.activevos.com/proof-casestudies.php.

About Western Governors University

Western Governors University (www.wgu.edu) is an online university driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs. WGU has flourished into a national university, serving over 19,000 students from all 50 states.

About Active Endpoints, Inc.

Active Endpoints (www.activevos.com) ActiveVOS is the business process management system (BPMS) that your development team will love. ActiveVOS empowers project teams to create business process management (BPM) applications using services, making their businesses more agile and effective. ActiveVOS promotes mass adoption of SOA-enabled BPM applications by focusing on accelerating project delivery time with a complete, affordable and easy-to-use system. Active Endpoints is headquartered in Waltham, MA with development facilities in Shelton, CT.

ActiveVOS is a trademark of Active Endpoints, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

Active Endpoints, Inc.
John Cingari, 1-203-253-2714
Chief Marketing Officer
john.cingari@activevos.com
www.activevos.com