Longwood University

Through an understanding of the ERP architecture and administrative data, IData Incorporated eliminates duplicate data entry and cumbersome manual processes:

Integrating Third Party Software with a University’s ERP System:
Longwood University runs two separate third party software systems that manage student housing, meal plans, and building access. The university was challenged by these multiple systems operating independently that required duplicate data entry across all of the systems. Longwood recognized a need to integrate the third party software with their ERP system in order to improve efficiency. The university turned to IData Incorporated to provide expert technical consulting to analyze the university’s systems and the procedures currently employed to process the necessary data. With a technical understanding of the school’s Student Information System, a series of jobs were created that import and export the necessary data between the ERP and the third party software systems. This eliminated the need for redundant data entry across multiple systems, increasing the staff’s efficiency and creating an improved user experience.

Automation of Financial Aid Payments:
In addition, Longwood University’s financial aid department used the ERP to run a series of daily jobs to apply payments to student accounts. Each job had to be run in series and the output manually checked by an employee before starting the next job. This was a very time-consuming process that regularly required employees to stay late into the evening to complete.

IData Incorporated created a set of automated scripts to run on the financial aid department’s servers once a day that automatically processes all the payment jobs sequentially and sends email notification that the process is complete. Each script also checks for errors in the output, and if any are found, reports them and stops the sequence.

Conclusion:
With the software systems successfully integrated and the financial department’s payment jobs automated, Longwood University released the log-jam in their processes and improved the performance of its software systems and the people who operate them.