Precision Scheduling

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21st Century Classroom

Precision Scheduling

5/1/2008

By Rama Ramaswami

Trenthem expects his next project to be the integration of MRM with the college's website. He wants to publicize upcoming campus events online, a process that's currently labor-intensive. "We're working to streamline and automate the process so that an individual can go into MRM, request catering and A/V services, and at the same time publish the event on our website."

Time to Work Out

Not every scheduling software package has to be enterprise-wide, or even complex. Kristen Miller, director of the fitness center at Northeastern University (MA), uses a scheduling tool from TimeTrade Systems to enable online signup for fitness classes. The center schedules up to 1,000 appointments a week. Before the TimeTrade software, "We basically had a telephone and paper," recalls Miller. "A user would call in to our facility and request a class.We had sheets of paper, wrote down the request in pencil, and a half-hour before, the user would call and cancel. There was somebody always on the phone at the office."

With the installation of TimeTrade, that changed completely. Students now use web-enabled terminals on campus to reserve courts and equipment or enroll in fitness activities at any time of day or night. The system tracks capacities and automatically closes classes that become full. Administrators can add instructors or classes, set limits on the number of appointments a student can have in the system, and con- figure the application to enforce rules. Administrators also have access to a full suite of resource utilization and activity reports. All this, Miller says, was available for a very reasonable cost. "The investment is fine with us-it's a couple of thousand dollars a year," she says. "And we're saving a ton of money because we no longer have to staff the phone all day long."

Streamlined Equipment Management

The concept of integrated scheduling applies to equipment as well. The four-year private Wheaton College (IL) uses an application from WebCheckout (a provider of portable equipment and facility scheduling) to manage 3,000 items of IT and A/V equipment that are regularly circulated on campus. WebCheckout inventories the equipment, processes reservations, tracks items that are out, and flags administrators if they are overdue.

Michael Rhoadarmer, Wheaton's media systems manager, reports that the WebCheckout application enables complete inventory management of the college's assets, with visibility into an item's status at any given point. The system also monitors installed technology; for instance, if a user reports problems with classroom equipment such as a projector or media player, an operator generates an online ticket for the item, enabling repair and maintenance to be tracked electronically.