Precision Scheduling

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21st Century Classroom

Precision Scheduling

5/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

The result was so successful that NetSimplicity incorporated Trenthem's program as a standard offering within MRM, allowing other Banner users access to this capability. By integrating curricular and extracurricular scheduling systems, colleges can view scheduled events and courses across the entire campus and set up a managed room booking process. MRM allows administrators to control student, faculty, and staff levels of access to booking or requesting rooms. In addition, the application integrates and automates requests for other room services, including A/V, room setup, and catering.

This feature-the ability to reserve rooms and other services at the same time-was an essential component Rhodes College was looking for. "With our previous home-grown software, the focus was just on room reservations, not related services," says Trenthem. "You could book a room online, but for other services, you had to make a series of other kinds of contacts to various departments, by phone, e-mail, or fax, and there were no obvious guidelines for doing that. If you had a good network of relationships, you could get the job done. If you didn't, or if you were new, the process was less consistent."

Now, the MRM system serves as a single point of contact for different types of reservations, making the process much easier for faculty, staff, and student users- Trenthem's objective from the get-go. "We wanted to reduce the obstacles to the customer," he says. "We never even set out to quantify ROI. We're trying to measure it now, in terms of improved services for the user, and the system is unquestionably a success in that respect." Since its debut in August 2007, the MRM system "has made an enormous difference on campus," agrees Kim Bennett, associate director of scheduling and college events. "Departments that transact large bookings, like the Admissions office, can reserve multiple locations-and the A/V equipment for each room-all in one session."

What's more, Threnthem says, the bottlenecks inherent in the old scheduling system have been streamlined. For example, when a student schedules an event, approval is required from the college's Event Planning department. But with MRM, those sign-offs are handled online via the system's approval cues. Now, says Trenthem, "It's unusual to have requests denied." He explains that while his team spent a good deal of time establishing levels of access to the system, the process has been working so well that most of the initial restrictions have been relaxed. "The system does have a permission structure, and we have categorized our resources-some groups of rooms are special, and restricted to certain groups; others are not. But customers have been very reasonable and we have been able to accommodate more requests."