SEP reaches key milestone with Campus Solutions upgrade
26 Oct 2020
The Student Experience Programme (SEP) Team delivered a landmark achievement for our University earlier this month with the successful upgrade of our core student records system, Campus Solutions.
The upgrade to version 9.2, one of the key drivers behind the original Student Lifecycle Project, gives us access to continued technical support from the software manufacturer, reducing the amount of time and resource spent supporting the system across the University. The upgrade delivers a cost saving of £250,000 which we would have had to pay for extended support of the old version.
Importantly it also enables us to start rolling out the new, simplified processes designed through SEP: reducing manual entry, increasing efficiency, and ultimately bringing about a step change in the experience for our applicants and students.
The first set of improvements, focussed on our admissions processes, have now gone live. They have been chosen specifically to make activities easier, less onerous, and more efficient – and are already making a difference to our admissions teams.
Becki Harrington, Admissions Manager in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, said: “The new staged admissions process will streamline how we review and make decisions on our staged postgraduate taught applications, reducing the reliance on shared spreadsheets and holding information in multiple areas. I’m really excited to see what broader information and insight we will be able to gather because of this change.”
Maheen Hussain, Senior Admissions Administrator in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, said: “We receive between 4,000 and 5,000 applications a year for our undergraduate Medicine and Dentistry programmes and in previous years would store applicant data, application assessments and shortlisting decisions in an offline database.
“As a result of the move to 9.2 and subsequent process improvements, we’re now able to store initial application decisions on Campus Solutions. This should simplify the process for academics making decisions on applications as, although some offline work will still be required, instead of numerous spreadsheets and database updates, the new process will capture the data we need in one report”.
Simon Merrywest, Director for the Student Experience and SEP Programme Director said: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the upgrade of Campus Solutions brings us to a turning point as a University. We can now begin to introduce the transformative changes colleagues have been working together to design since SEP began.
“This first set of improvements are focussed on making things simpler for our admissions colleagues after what has been an extremely challenging summer. In turn this will result in faster decisions and an improved experience for applicants. Further process improvements across admissions and subsequently for current students will be rolled out incrementally over the coming months and we’ll be sharing our revised SEP plans shortly.
“I’d like to thank the SEP Team, IT Services and the operational teams for their hard work on this upgrade, which is a great example of colleagues from different parts of our University working across organisational boundaries on a shared goal, something the Programme is keen to encourage.
The work the team put in ensured the deadline, brought forward from the original plan, was met and the transition a smooth one, despite taking place during one of the most challenging weeks in the recent history of our University.”
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