Clients - The Master's Seminary and College
Journey To A Unified Campus
Founded in 1927, the Master's College and Seminary provides a non-denominational liberal arts education fully integrated with the Christian faith. The college believes that personal attention in a small college atmosphere is a vital element to the campus. In order to serve Master's two campus sites, 1,100 students, and more than 50 academic programs effectively, the college needed a system that would provide an integrated modern system with a centralized database. Their current system, Quodata Classic was not able to do this.
Master's made many attempts to customize the old system to make it work for their needs.
The staff became increasingly less interested in going through the effort of modifying
screens and upgrading the system to keep it working, knowing that they needed to make a
transition to a system that would eventually unify their systems, easing the burden of
ongoing maintenance, while enhancing productivity across campus. The Seminary threatened
not to use the old system at all, preferring instead to generate Microsoft Access documents
that could be entered on the main campus. They really wanted a fully Web-enabled product
for student, faculty and community.
At one point, in 1999, a decision was made to migrate the old Quodata system to a newer
version. However the migration had so many difficulties of its own, it was eventually
abandoned as too complex and costly.
"Our administrative system was split into three databases, and on an entirely different
platform then the rest of our institution. In addition we had departments purchasing a
host of other software products to provide features that were not available from our
administrative system," said Brian Bierman, Database Administrator.
Michael Leathers, Director of Information Technology, initiated the call for action. They
began their search based on common vendor names known on campus: Exeter, Datatel, and
SunGard Higher Education.
Master's was able to rule out several vendors that were too big and expensive for their
staffing and financial position.
PowerCAMPUS had the functionality and provided the level of personal attention to their
clients that Master's desired, with a mission and vision that was in accord with the
College and Seminary's own approach to its constituents. Due to the college's readiness to
move to a new solution, the selection process moved quickly and in March 2001 Master's
College selected PowerCAMPUS as the foundation for it's new web-enabled student- and
administrative- information system.
"PowerCAMPUS met the factors we needed: price, a Microsoft platform, and a customizable
web-based application," said Bierman. "PowerCAMPUS would provide us with functionality,
accessibility, compatibility, support and development," added Ben Marland, Database
Administrator.
Master's Administrative staff was excited about moving to this new system. In late
November 2001, the PowerCAMPUS Advancement module was the first to ""go live." And, by
the summer of 2002, Enrollment, Academic Records, and Billing were live, as well.
Since the implementation of the PowerCAMPUS modules, there has been noticeable
improvement in Master's processes and productivity. "As we have grown accustomed to the
interface and functions of PowerCAMPUS, our user satisfaction is lifted higher and higher," said
Marland.
"More people in our department can now accomplish advancement tasks with far greater
efficiency. In addition, we are able to use reports and other tools unavailable with our
old system. We accomplish more with less, and what we are able to accomplish grows with
each day of experience, " said Marland.
Due to the effective and continuing support from PowerCAMPUS, the need for on-campus
user support greatly diminished after the conversions were complete. "SunGard Higher Education's team approach
to implementation and support has been a very positive experience," said
Bierman.
The benefits of PowerCAMPUS will continue to be realized as the institution becomes
more familiar with the product and as they complete their own modifications. Master's was
able to unite three very large and redundant databases into one. The SQL Server Database
Management System made it possible to move many tasks and reports to Web-based
applications, some of which are contained in IQ.Web, fulfilling one of the original
objectives: a Web-accessible information system.
Master's College and Seminary continues to depend on SunGard Higher Education for product updates and support.
When asked if, given the choice, they would again make the decision to partner with
SunGard Higher Education, Bierman said, "We still believe SunGard Higher Education was the best decision for the
price."