CASE STUDY

Strengthening HR Operations at a Private Regional University

April 17, 2026

Services: HR Consulting, HR Operations

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A private, nonprofit university in Southern California serves a diverse student population across undergraduate, graduate, professional, adult, and online programs. As the institution continued to grow and evolve, university leadership recognized the need to take a hard look at how its Human Resources function was operating – not just how it was structured, but how the work was actually getting done. 

The Problem 

The university’s HR function was staffed by capable, knowledgeable individuals. But capability alone wasn’t enough to keep pace with the institution’s scale and complexity. Across nearly every HR discipline, the same patterns kept surfacing: work driven by individual initiative rather than standardized processes, systems that didn’t communicate with each other, and functions lacking discernible workflows.

The consequences were real:

• Employee and manager experiences varied depending on who they contacted and when.
• Case volume in Employee Relations was high and largely reactive, with one leader carrying the weight of intake, guidance, investigations, compliance, and risk mitigation largely on her own.
• Leaves of absence were tracked manually.
• Benefits enrollment required duplicative data entry across disconnected systems.
• Talent Acquisition was processing high hiring volumes with staffing ratios that left little room for anything beyond getting the next hire across the finish line. 

At the technology level, the university was managing a fragmented ecosystem — Banner as the core HRIS and ERP, PeopleAdmin for recruiting and onboarding, SmartBen transitioning to a new benefits platform, UKG Ready rolling out for timekeeping, ADP handling payroll services, and a range of point solutions for compliance training, employment verification, and leave management. Few of these systems were well integrated, and the lack of a clear system of record meant that HR staff spent significant time on manual reconciliation rather than higher-value work. 

Governance added another layer of risk. Decision rights between HR, academic leadership, and administrative units were inconsistently defined. There was no standardized intake or triage model — requests were routed based on relationships and availability rather than clear protocols. Without that structure, HR’s ability to act as a predictable, trusted partner to university leadership was limited. 

The Solution

BPM was engaged to conduct a two-phase HR assessment designed to give the institution a complete picture of both how HR was organized and how HR work was actually being performed. 

Phase I addressed organizational structure, staffing, governance, and service delivery design. Phase II – the subject of this engagement – went deeper, evaluating functional execution across the entire employee lifecycle. BPM consultants conducted targeted interviews with HR leadership and staff, reviewed existing workflows, tools, templates, and documentation, and benchmarked findings against comparable higher-education HR models. 

The Phase II assessment covered nine functional disciplines:  

For each discipline, BPM assessed current maturity levels, identified what was working, surfaced specific pain points and root causes, and evaluated the organizational and operational impact of existing gaps. Rather than treating every finding as an isolated problem, BPM drew connections across functions to identify the cross-cutting themes driving risk – including the over-reliance on individual contributors, fragmented technology, and the absence of standardized intake and escalation mechanisms. 

The assessment concluded with a prioritized set of recommendations and a directional implementation roadmap that gave university leadership a practical path forward, organized by immediate focus areas, near-term considerations, and strategic decisions requiring leadership alignment. 

The Outcome 

The Phase II assessment gave the institution a clear, evidence-based picture of where its HR function stood and what needed to change. Rather than treating symptoms, BPM’s work identified the underlying conditions driving risk, inconsistency, and capacity strain – and connected those conditions to concrete, prioritized action. 

Key recommendations from the engagement included:

• Establishing a standardized HR intake and triage model
• Clarifying decision rights and escalation authority across HR and institutional leadership
• Reducing single-point-of-failure risk through cross-training and role design
• Accelerating HR systems integration and automation
• Embedding manager enablement more deliberately into core HR workflows

BPM also recommended a comprehensive HR technology systems analysis as a near-term next step – noting that greater system integration and the potential consolidation of the current multi-platform environment could resolve a significant share of the operational friction identified in the assessment. As the report concluded, implementing clear accountability structures alongside a modern integrated HRMS has the potential to address approximately 75% of the issues identified across both phases of the engagement. 

Together, Phase I and Phase II give the institution a comprehensive foundation for building a more sustainable, scalable, and trusted HR function – one capable of supporting its workforce and leadership for years to come. 

Ready To Build a Stronger HR Function? 

BPM’s HR consulting team works with higher-education institutions and mission-driven organizations to assess, design, and improve HR operations at every stage of maturity. Whether you’re dealing with governance gaps, technology fragmentation, or capacity constraints, we can help you identify what’s driving risk and chart a clear path forward. Contact us to learn more.