Keeping campuses in step with higher education's demands for better service, engagement and accountability

Today, campuses need to be more integrated, student friendly and responsive than ever before. But to evolve into a truly agile campus that is as close to students as it is to every constituent in the ecosystem, campuses need to look beyond traditional technology.

Institutions today are faced with challenges across increased competition, delivery, compliance, governance and outcomes. With increased student centricity brought about by increased competitive pressures, the need for a unified view of the student is today more than ever. Beyond admissions and on boarding, this stretches to student services, transactions, career & placement cells and alumni engagement. At the backend, this spans HR and payroll, facilities, exams and student administration. Unified view of the student lies at the heart of the on-demand model. The focus is clearly on delivering better student experience by integrating systems managing relationships.

Fulfil compliance mandates

The increased demand for transparency aimed towards bringing better governance has resulted in stricter compliance norms for universities and colleges. This has led to complex structures and in-depth audits which demand significant time from university resources. Universities who have taken the technology route with automated processes and analytical dashboards are seeing significant improvements in reduction of manual efforts, increased data accuracy and timely submission of reports to authorities.

Integrated platform powered by real-time dashboards

It includes a data warehouse with analytic views across a range of student and operational metrics and KPIs. Combined with powerful interactive data visualization tools from Microsoft Power BI, the solution provides the most cost-effective reporting solution for: enrolment trends, program capacity, persistence, and retention rates, satisfactory academic progress and student progression, financial aid compliance, regulatory reporting and customized transcripts.

Flexible academic delivery model

The open and flexible model provides; dean, registrar and faculty with a powerful tool to support today’s and tomorrow’s demand for more program options and flexibility. It can help institutions automatically track programs, catalogues, sessions, and registrations, make grades available and flag students in need of additional help. It also makes it much easier for institutions to consolidate data for compliance with reporting requirements of regulatory bodies at the same time transforms curriculum planning & course scheduling and meet students’ needs on-campus and online. The key highlights are: Organise and automate enrolment tasks, monitor student progress, make final grades available automatically and ensure easy and accurate reporting and compliance.

Dynamic platform encompassing Mobile, Social and Web

With Mobile Portal, institutions can mobilize the entire campus and empower students, faculty and staff through a single, user-friendly and secure mobile platform. They can use Social media profiles to scan contacts and expand understanding of prospect and student sentiments, influences, and needs. Facebook®, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media content can be shared from the application.

Drive operational efficiencies:

1. Optimize Faculty and Staff

Institution’s most valuable assets are the faculty, staff, and administrators working to guide students to success. They need a global view of the campus and the ability to extend self-service functionality to the workforce, which includes:  Organization charts of employee base, open positions and departmental structures, faculty recruitment, on-boarding and management for improved talent retention, benefits management based on role, length of employment, standard and elective categories and payroll processing with multiple pay schedules for all types of employee compensation.

2. Streamline Financial Processing

With lean staff and complex processes, community colleges need a solution that eliminates redundant data entry and expedites transactional processing.

The Finance, HR & Payroll provides: Secure information access and views tailored to each staff role, automated approval routings built around your institution’s policies, Centralized and decentralized budget planning and reconciliation, Mobile access for productivity while away from the desk.

3. Lead Generation and Candidate Data Management

Institutions can look at functionalities beyond the normal to include guided program selling at a counselling stage and better program cross-selling capabilities to contribute towards seat optimisation. Further the solution is scalable to match your growth needs as you scale upwards.

4. Institutional Outreach

With personalised marketing campaigns educational institutions can now increase their brand presence within prospective audiences to include Alumni, external academicians, prospective employers, research and funding houses for awareness and future collaborations.

Expert Management and Administration

With managed services, institutions gain additional resources and expertise to: scale easily as budgets shrink and competition for staff increases, configure solutions to your exact business processes and goals, maximize utilization of features and capabilities of ERP solutions and manage costs through a fixed, predictable, pay-as-you-go pricing model.

CONCLUSION

With the right technology platform, campuses can afford to bring in more focus on academic parameters. It means more resource and attention bandwidth can be freed for improving academic experience, delivery mechanisms, monitoring and measuring progress and in regulatory compliance. This strengthens the entire academic eco-system and lends greater flexibility for universities to innovate across the board.

Mr. Raj Mruthyunjayappa
Head of Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa divisions
Campus Management Corp.