ERP system coming to campus

Assumption College has employed significant technological advancement in the past few years, the latest being the new DATATEL system, a form of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.? This system is a new administration service for the entire campus, providing a single access point for information pertaining to both academics and administration for the college.Specifically designed for higher education, this software will not only benefit the students, but provide them with a single convenient location and one central database. Major functions and resources from a varying range of places will be housed into a single network.?

"ERP is important because the system itself links things like college finance, admissions, financial aid, student information, course information and institutional advancement. It allows the college to gather data from all of those areas," explained Dawn Thistle, Director of Library Services and IT. Thistle also added that students can link their demographic information, course schedules, bills and finances with this new system, as well as integrate with the alumni offices upon graduation.

"We have selected DATATEL and the product is called Colleague," said Thistle, describing the system that pulls everything together. "We wanted to have an entry point into the college for everybody who works here and all the students who attend here, so you can log into the portal and it gives you the information that you need to know."

This system will benefit all departments of the college, as staff and administration will be able to use real-time integrated budget and planning tools, faculty can submit their grades online and students can access their degree audits all on one centralized database.

Planning to implement this system began over the summer, when the school signed contracts and started to buy hardware and new servers to form and house the database. Representatives from DATATEL came to campus and interviewed to figure out the best way to enact the system. Training groups met and continue to meet almost every day to put the new system into place.

"The first module that is going to go live is the finance module, and that happens on June 1 when our fiscal year changes. All of the other ones will be going live every couple of months, right through the Fall of 2010," said Thistle. "It seems like a long way off, but it's a very compressed implementation schedule, most of these projects take up to four years, but we're doing it in a year and a half. Everybody's working very hard, so we wanted to let the whole campus know, the students especially."

To update the system, data will be fed into the system from the respective offices. "It's a labor-intensive process for events on campus, and it depends on the structure of the organization," said Thistle. The DATATEL system will also be connected with the new website, scheduled to be changed on April 15, which will serve as an admissions portal for prospective students.

To introduce DATATEL to the campus, there was an event on Monday, April 6, called "A Colleague of our Own," a spin off the movie A League of Their Own, to introduce the Colleague product. "We introduced our starting line-up, or our team, of all the people that are involved in the implementation of this huge system," said Thistle. "Hopefully it will get people thinking about this project, because most of it happens behind the scenes.