Meet Sean, the project manager and consultant who saw a bigger picture

When Sean Burchell first started looking for a new automation platform, he thought UT Health Science Center San Antonio simply needed a better way to digitize forms. But once the project manager and consultant encountered Nutrient’s approach to workflows, everything shifted. Instead of asking how to automate tasks, he and his team began asking why those tasks existed and how they connected.

From missed emails to mission risk: The need for a better system

The graduate school at UT Health Science Center San Antonio(opens in a new tab) serves nearly 500 graduate students and employs more than 700 faculty members. Each student goes through a 3–5 year educational journey with many milestones, approvals, and academic decisions required along the way. These approval requirements can originate from students, research mentors, external faculty, and even the dean’s office.

Historically, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and the affiliated academic programs relied on a homegrown automated system. It captured much of the same information Nutrient now holds, and it worked well, but it was neither flexible nor sustainable. Many approvals were still difficult to track, and mobile use wasn’t possible.

“It wasn’t just about going from A to B,” Burchell said. “It was about understanding what needed to happen in between and why.”

Once Burchell saw Nutrient’s approach to simplifying complex processes, he immediately realized what was missing: the ability to see how tasks interconnect, evolve, and support broader institutional goals.

Building GradTrac: A smarter way to manage graduate operations

UT Health San Antonio set out to streamline graduate academic operations by building GradTrac, a centralized platform powered entirely by Nutrient. Burchell partnered with Kyle Hitchcock, an application programmer associate, and Tiffany Thompson, the academic program manager. Thompson mapped out the university’s existing procedures and helped identify key areas for improvement, while Hitchcock quickly recognized the value of Nutrient’s platform and began building out workflows that could scale and adapt.

With help from Nutrient, the team replaced manual routing with logic-based processes and built conditional rules that flex automatically depending on a student’s program, advisor, or milestone. Instead of maintaining dozens of separate processes, the team developed intelligent templates that adjust dynamically to each case.

All data remained securely housed within UT Health San Antonio’s infrastructure, meeting Texas’s strict security requirements while maintaining internal control. Even complex workflows involving up to 15 approvals were streamlined through logic paths and stakeholder routing that once required custom code. Features like dashboards, automated routing, and mobile form signing added new levels of efficiency, transparency, and accessibility across the entire operation.

“The biggest benefit? Our teams could finally see the logic behind the processes. We cleaned up bad data and built something we can grow with.”

From overwhelmed to empowered: Results that speak for themselves

Before Nutrient, milestone approvals were in a system that was rigid, custom-built, and difficult to maintain. It worked, but it wasn’t designed to grow with them. Staff members like Thompson were overwhelmed managing form submissions and follow-ups‌ — especially around graduation. Today, processes that once consumed 90 percent of her time are streamlined in Nutrient, a platform end users love for being user-friendly, flexible, and mobile-ready.

Faculty can be assigned in real time, approvals are routed instantly, and bottlenecks are easy to identify and resolve. Additionally, maintenance is simpler, processes are cleaner, and the team no longer depends on a single person who knows “the code.” Burchell and his team have unlocked new confidence, flexibility, and operational resilience.

The ability to approve documents from mobile devices, view dashboards, and configure complex workflows without IT intervention has empowered staff across the graduate school to work smarter and faster.

Rethinking processes, reimagining what’s possible

With Nutrient’s support, UT Health San Antonio built on the foundation of its homegrown system, moving into connected, conditional workflows that offer greater flexibility and sustainability. During the migration, the team was able to step back, review its processes, and improve them before rebuilding in Nutrient.

As Burchell shared, “Understanding workflows was the tipping point.” Hitchcock echoed that sentiment, saying, “We can now quickly turn around business processes” — a shift that’s allowed the team to deliver big results across departments.

With clean data, reusable workflows, and smart automation in place, the team isn’t just managing its work better; it’s thinking about it differently. And it’s ready for whatever’s next.