How one state agency turned a manual nightmare into an automated success story—and what they learned along the way
If you’ve ever managed a government funding program through Excel spreadsheets, you know the pain. The endless email chains. The version control nightmares. The “wait, did we already approve this one?” moments. The State of North Dakota’s Human Resource Management Services division lived this reality every day while managing $500,000 in legislative intern funding across 63 state agencies.
But here’s the thing: they don’t anymore.
The Excel Spreadsheet Struggle Was Real
Picture this: The North Dakota legislature allocates half a million dollars annually for state agency internships. Each agency can request up to 50% funding per intern. Simple enough, right?
Except the process involved agencies submitting requests, HR vetting them, sending authorizations, tracking hires, coordinating with Finance for payments, and then documenting everything for legislative reporting. All through spreadsheets, email, and manual processes.
Darin Schorsch, the HRIS Manager who shepherded this transformation, put it simply during our recent PeopleSoft webinar: “We needed a way for agencies to be able to submit a request, for that request to be vetted, for it to be sent back and authorized, for them to start the process of doing the hire, and then report that hire to GT eForms.”
The kicker? They needed to show the legislature where the money was going, what impact it was having, and prove they were managing taxpayer dollars responsibly. Try doing that with scattered spreadsheets.
Enter GT eForms and a Whole New World
North Dakota took a different approach than many organizations facing similar challenges. Instead of buying a third-party system or building something from scratch, they used GT eForms for PeopleSoft to automate the entire workflow within their existing PeopleSoft HCM system.
The solution handles everything:
- Automated request submission from state agencies
- Workflow routing through approximately seven approval stages
- Email notifications at each step
- Hire tracking once interns are onboarded
- Payment coordination between HR and Finance
- Real-time dashboards for legislative reporting
But here’s where it gets really cool: They integrated PeopleSoft Insights to create live visualizations of the funding data. No more manually compiling reports for the legislature. The dashboards show in real-time where the money is going, which agencies are participating, and the program’s overall impact.
“It’s kind of fun to see the digital representation of that data on the screen so we can quickly understand where the money is going and how impactful it is,” Darin noted.
The Timeline: Nine Months from Idea to Launch
One of the most surprising aspects of this project? The timeline. The entire implementation—from discovery to user acceptance testing—took about nine months. And that includes a learning curve.
Here’s how it broke down:
- April-May: Discovery and onboarding sessions
- June: First development pass on forms and search functionality
- July: Adding logic, dynamic data pulls, and PeopleSoft integration
- August-September: Security, navigation, and change requests
- October-November: User acceptance testing
The secret to making it work? It wasn’t just the technology—it was the partnership.
The Support That Made the Difference
Here’s something you don’t often hear in government technology projects: the vendor support was exceptional.
Darin’s team would send in a question about capabilities or encounter a challenge. The response time? Same day. Often within the hour. Multiple times.
“We would send in a question like ‘how can we do this,’ and we would get responded to that day, multiple times within the hour,” Darin recalled. “Most of the time it’s like, ‘Hey, tomorrow, what time can you guys meet?’ Literally that fast.”
This wasn’t just about speed—it was about having technical experts who understood both the technology and the business process. The GT consulting team would hop on calls, troubleshoot together, and help the state team learn the platform while building their solution.
The Learning Curve Factor
Let’s be real about something: this was North Dakota’s first major GT eForms project. Anita Lemaire, the chief developer, and Darin were learning the system’s capabilities while building the solution.
“There’s a combination of learning what the capabilities of GT were,” Darin explained. “This would be much faster for people that understood and were well aware of the capabilities of GT, whereas we were learning the system.”
About 30% of Darin’s time over nine months went into this project. For organizations already familiar with GT eForms, the timeline would likely be significantly shorter.
But here’s the upside of that learning curve: North Dakota now has internal expertise to tackle their next automation project.
One-Click Form Generation (Yes, Really)
One of the coolest features Darin demoed during the webinar? The ability to generate a new intern funding request directly from the Insights dashboard with a single button click.
Think about that. The legislative reporting dashboard isn’t just showing data—it’s integrated directly into the operational workflow. Click a button, and boom: a new form is created with relevant data pre-populated, ready for the next funding request.
This is what intelligent process automation actually looks like in practice. No context switching between systems. No manual data entry. Just seamless workflow.
What’s Next: Expanding the Solution
Success breeds ambition. North Dakota isn’t stopping with intern funding.
They’re currently working on a reclassification process using the same GT eForms framework. As Darin explained, “There’s no app within PeopleSoft, there’s no process within PeopleSoft for us to capture those types of requests that affect job and position information.”
Translation: They found another manual, painful process and they’re automating it.
They’re also implementing GT eForms Assistant as part of their upgrade to version 3.75, which will add even more capabilities to their toolkit.
The Audit Trail Nobody Talks About
Here’s something that doesn’t make headlines but matters enormously in government work: audit trails.
Every comment, every field change, every approval—all documented automatically within the form. When auditors come calling or legislators ask questions about who approved what and when, there’s no scrambling to reconstruct the paper trail from email archives.
It’s just there. In the system. Timestamped and attributed.
For compliance-heavy environments, this is golden.
Lessons for Other Organizations
If you’re in a similar boat—managing complex approval workflows through spreadsheets and email—here’s what North Dakota’s experience suggests:
1. You don’t need to rip and replace everything North Dakota built this entirely within their existing PeopleSoft environment. No new systems to license, no integration headaches, no user training on completely new platforms.
2. Start with a real pain point Intern funding was genuinely painful. The ROI was obvious. Starting with a clear business problem made it easier to define success and maintain momentum.
3. Budget time for learning If it’s your first automation project, account for the learning curve. But remember: you’re building internal capability that pays dividends on future projects.
4. Partner quality matters The difference between a vendor who responds in days versus hours can make or break a project timeline. Responsive, expert support isn’t a luxury—it’s essential.
5. Think beyond just automation The Insights dashboards weren’t part of the original pain point, but they’ve become one of the most valuable aspects. Think about what becomes possible when data flows automatically.
The Bottom Line
Nine months. One developer at 30% time. A learning curve. And North Dakota transformed a manual, error-prone process into an automated workflow that manages half a million dollars across 63 agencies.
More importantly, they built internal expertise and confidence. The next automation project will be faster. The one after that, even more so.
As Darin put it: “From using GT, it’s been a real adventure, and it’s really exciting to see the capabilities out there and what you can do with it. You want to find those kinds of people that are interested in making a difference and utilizing tools like this and making jobs easier.”
That’s the real transformation—not just the technology, but what it enables people to do.
Want to See It in Action?
Watch the full webinar recording to see Darin walk through the live system, demonstrate the one-click form generation, and show the Insights dashboards in real-time.
Facing similar challenges in your organization? Whether you’re in higher education, public sector, or enterprise, manual processes are costing you time, money, and sanity.
Schedule a consultation to explore how process automation could transform your workflows—without ripping out your existing systems.
Building photo © Bobak Ha’Eri / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and modified with State of North Dakota seal by Gideon Taylor.
