The admissions landscape at Fudan University School of Management spans thirteen programs: the MBA, International MBA, and EMBA each run tracks for Chinese and international students; joint programs with overseas institutions include MIT, the University of Hong Kong, BI Norwegian Business School, and the University of Washington; and degree and non-degree programs such as MPAcc and EDP round out the portfolio. With more programs and more applicants, and each program carrying its own application form, scoring criteria, and round schedule, running admissions for thirteen programs efficiently and consistently has become a standing task for the school.
Challenge
Admissions at a business school is a long process. An applicant moves through seven or eight stages — registration, the application form, document submission, background assessment, pre-admission interviews, confirmation of provisional admission, and formal admission. At Fudan SOM, it happens across thirteen programs at once, each with different rounds, interview schedules, and scoring criteria.
Before this system went live, most of those stages were stitched together by hand: applicants prepared stacks of paper documents, program offices sorted, scored, and compiled them one by one, and notifications went out one phone call and one email at a time. As programs multiplied, the burden grew on both ends — applicants could not tell where their application stood, program teams had no full view of each applicant’s progress, and admissions data sat scattered across program spreadsheets; anyone who wanted a look at admissions sources or conversion had to compile it manually afterward.
Solution
The business school admissions system was developed by Cloud Coach, going live in December 2013 on the Fudan-HKU IMBA E-STREAM program. The workflow is short: applicants visit the online registration site and sign up with a mobile number and a verification code, fill in the application form, and upload attachments (PDF, JPG, DOC); after submission they move into background assessment and interview scoring. Results are published online, and provisionally admitted applicants confirm their result online with a written commitment, through to formal admission — the whole process is paperless, sparing applicants the trouble of preparing paper materials and cutting the program office’s manual workload.
Rules for every stage are configurable per program: application form cards are customizable, with fields added, removed, or modified on the default template; application status, scoring content, rounds, and interview times can all be set, either open for applicants to choose or assigned centrally by the back office. On the admissions officer’s side, the system filters applicants by keywords such as name, mobile number, and email, combined with conditions like status, tags, rounds, and interviews; officers can email a selected group of applicants with one click, or send automatic reminders by email and SMS as applications progress. Every contact with an applicant is logged, and each entry can carry custom tags for later filtering — so a program holds a complete picture of every applicant and can focus its admissions work accordingly.
The system also provides admissions analytics, covering quantitative indicators, admissions progress, and admissions sources — a reference for decisions across programs.
Outcome
From the first program going live in December 2013 to today, thirteen programs at Fudan SOM have completed admissions on this system:
- Fudan MBA (China, Overseas)
- Fudan IMBA MIT (China, Overseas)
- Fudan IMBA S3 ASIA
- Fudan-HKU IMBA (G-STREAM, E-STREAM)
- Fudan-BI (Norway) IMBA
- Fudan EMBA
- Fudan-Washington EMBA
- Fudan MPAcc
- Fudan EDP
The first change lands on both ends. Applicants can check where their application stands in the registration center at any time — interview times, background assessment results, interview results, and admission results all laid out clearly; program offices record an applicant’s full behavioral data from the first touchpoint, tracking progress and running admissions work without after-the-fact manual compilation. Over years of operation, the admissions process has been recognized by the Graduate School of Fudan University.
The system that matured at Fudan SOM has since reached more business schools: Fudan International School of Finance, the School of Economics, the MBA Center at Beijing Normal University, and the National University of Singapore, among institutions in China and abroad.
The system is very friendly to applicants — mobile sign-up, online forms, and application status they can check at any time; the whole application process is clear and smooth, and applicants no longer call back and forth about materials and timing. For our program office, the back office is just as easy: the admissions pipeline is clear at a glance, and filtering, notifications, and statistics are all fast — we put more of our energy into interviews and selection itself.
Sun Long, Director of the Fudan-HKU IMBA Program, Fudan University School of Management
The stages of admissions themselves have not changed: background assessment continues, pre-admission interviews continue, and so does the confirmation that follows provisional admission. What changed is how those stages are carried — when every application step leaves a record and every applicant’s progress is visible, admissions shifts from being stitched together by hand to running on a system.
