Mount Holyoke College

Mount Holyoke College (MHC) hosts two popular weekend reunion events for its alumni each year staffed by paid and volunteer workers from the current student body. The typical reunion involves around 2,500 individual jobs performed by between 100 and 200 student workers assigned to the reunion jobs by a random lottery system. Previously, a student worker would register for reunion work by submitting a paper application to the reunion committee. The committee would then collect all of the applications, sit down with a printout of jobs and student workers, and then begin the process of manually assigning student workers to job openings. This stand-alone system had many manual steps that needed to be repeated each year, including the re-entering of redundant data.

Wanting to provide the best possible experience for the students and staff, and realizing that a more accurate and efficient automated system would save valuable employee time and effort, MHC turned to IData, Incorporated to provide expert technical consulting.

The solution:

IData, Incorporated created a robust, full-featured Reunion Worker Management System that is fully integrated with MHC’s ERP system, and includes:

• a web-based application where student workers can register for reunion work
• an automated job assignment process
• an automated lottery system
• an automated process for emailing assignment schedules to student workers
• an automated process for copying reunion jobs from one year to the next
• student worker tracking
• job management
• a suite of flexible reports

IData’s solution is highly configurable and extremely flexible; the job assignment rules can easily be updated as needed and new reunion events added and staffed quickly and accurately. Now tasks that previously took weeks to complete can be accomplished in mere minutes.

Conclusion:

With IData, Incorporated’s expertise, the Reunion Workers Management System was successfully built and integrated within the school’s existing ERP system. Mount Holyoke College relieved the burden of manually entering large amounts of data each year, and gained a fully-integrated and automated system that greatly improves accuracy and efficiency while remaining flexible and configurable to allow for the future growth of the reunion events.

MHC’s vision, combined with IData, Incorporated’s technical expertise and attractive pricing made the new Reunion Workers Management System a true win-win solution.