Using BRy Tecnologia's API, the university made the process more agile and secure
The complete migration from the physical diploma to the digital version at universities, determined by the Ministry of Education (MEC) at the end of 2018, had an extended deadline and begins to take effect in April this year. However, many universities have already decided to make the change because of the benefits it offers both for the institution and for its students. The São Paulo State University “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP) is one of them. In April 2021, the institution began to offer the digital diploma to more than 35,000 undergraduate students. The migration from the physical to the digital process reduced the time for document production by up to 76% and facilitated the routine of all those involved in this process. To implement the digital diploma, UNESP had the support of BRy Tecnologia, a company specializing in identification, formalization and digital registration, which developed the API used to ensure the safety and efficiency of the process.
On average, 5,600 students graduate annually from UNESP and Vitor da Silva Palacios, responsible for the university's GTRA, says that the quest to make issuing diplomas more agile has been part of the institution's objectives for some years. “Since 2001, when the first regulation on digital signatures was published, UNESP already believed that this technology could positively impact the process of issuing diplomas. When Ordinance No. 330 of the Ministry of Education (MEC) was published in 2018, UNESP began to seek ways to operationalize the change from the physical signature to the digital diploma, guaranteeing the validity and legal certainty necessary for this document”, he explains. .
To put the change into practice, after mapping how the process worked on paper and understanding how it could be optimized in the digital model, UNESP established the infrastructure of requirements necessary to start issuing diplomas in a digital way and went in search of a company partner for the digital signature process. BRy was chosen for meeting the requirements established by UNESP and for having the best cost-benefit ratio. Some of the main points, recalls Vitor, were related to “security and automation flows”. Another important point for choosing the solution was the fact that BRy offers an API, which can be integrated into the UNESP diploma issuance and registration system.
The API, a technology that allows systems to be integrated, is one of BRy Tecnologia's great differentials. “We understand that educational institutions that seek to include digital signatures in their systems, want to facilitate the routine of users and make it as agile and secure as possible. Making the user enter a different portal, with different usability and visual identity, is out of the question. That's why we invest in offering technology that is easily customized to the reality of each BRy customer and that offers all the benefits of our technology in the customer's environment”, says BRy's CTO, Cristian Thiago Moecke.
With BRy's API integrated into the university's system, part of the diploma issuance process has already become digital and UNESP is already working to make the entire 100% process digital, from the request, through the inclusion of documents in the process and the signature until reach the students. In addition, once issued and registered, the digital diploma is stored in the institution's database and can be easily accessed whenever necessary, including to verify its validity.
The digital diploma generated, in addition to time savings that can reach 76%, savings in material and human resources. With the digital model, the costs of stationery items (paper, pen, etc.) and printing are considerably reduced. The digital process also allows optimizing the work of professionals involved in issuing diplomas, allowing them to dedicate themselves to more strategic activities for the institution. Another benefit offered by the digital version is the increase in the security and reliability of the document, reducing the chance of a diploma being forged, for example.
“The digital diploma brings benefits, both for the institution and for the students. However, for these benefits to be felt in practice, the process of migrating from physical to digital must be built based on the reality of each institution and count on the support of a team with technical knowledge to implement the changes. Having BRy's support was essential for the process to be carried out successfully at UNESP, both for the efficiency of the solution and for the support that the company's team offered us”, concludes Vitor.
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