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MANAGING EXCELLENCE: Campus Management Offers Another Choice for ERP
6/1/2005
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations don’t have to take years and cost millions.
Just ask Campus Management Corporation (www.campusmanagement.com). The Boca Raton, Florida-based firm offers robust but rapidly deployable ERP solutions for colleges and universities focused on student services. The flagship solution, CampusVue, is a Windows-based suite of software that drives all the school’s admissions, academic, and administrative processes into one centralized database. The system is easy to use and even easier to support, and highly affordable. Better still—typical implementations take just six to nine months to complete.
Like ERP solutions from vendors such as Oracle/PeopleSoft, SAP, and SunGard SCT, Campus Management offers visibility of data across areas such as admissions, financial aid, human resources, and student accounts, to name a few. The difference, however, is in the approach. While other vendors offer cumbersome solutions that require months upon months of customization, Campus Management offers a turnkey approach, enabling implementations to go quickly and smoothly time and time again. Turnkey d'esn’t mean inflexible; Campus Management solutions are both customizable and configurable, and according to Product Manager Matt Barry, they put as much value in the front-end practice of researching a solution as the solution itself.
“Our goal is for customers to achieve operational excellence not only with their software but with their internal business practices, too,” says Barry, who adds that Campus Management serves 900 campuses in higher education overall. “We concentrate on developing features for our software that have a demonstrable benefit in addition to meeting the needs of general market trends.”
Trends today include the increasing complexities of issues like regulatory compliance. Campus Management is already there, offering built-in “Audit Extract Reporting”—simplifying compliance reporting by automating the extraction and consolidation of data from far-flung corners of the ERP in an instant.
Focusing on Education
Perhaps nobody understands the value of Campus Management’s approach better than Matt Johnston, vice president at Santa Barbara Business College (CA). For years, SBBC coordinated data in its financial, HR, and student systems by hand, printing up huge paper-based reports and sending them from campus to campus upon request. If, for instance, the Student Services director wanted data on the latest course enrollment rates, he would request a report. When the report arrived weeks later, in many cases it was too late to present accurate information about the subject in question. There were other problems, too. If the report presented data in a format that differed from what the director wanted, he was out of luck; there was no way to manipulate the data at all.
Finally, in early 2004, years of frustration with their manual procedures forced Johnston to make a change.
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