Bringing a Higher Level of Scheduling to Higher Education
Client Profile
St. Anselm College is a prestigious Benedictine Catholic Liberal Arts College in Manchester, New Hampshire with an enrollment of 1,956 students.
Since 1889, St. Anselm has upheld the philosophy “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” an idea that now applies equally to its excellent academic curricula and its vastly improved room scheduling system.
The Situation
St. Anselm College had long held a strong tradition as being one of the nation’s finest institutes of higher learning. But as is often the case, there were a number of internal systems and procedures at the school that had begun to show their age. This was particularly true of the methods that had long been used to schedule rooms and equipment at St. Anselm.
The severity of the situation presented itself when an assessment was made by the St. Anselm information technology staff. Uncovered were a number of procedural problems that were keeping operations from running at maximum efficiency.
- All reservation requests for the entire college were being telephone to a single office in the IT department.
- Different staff members were leaving overlapping reservation requests on an answering machine when no one was available to answer the phone.
- Process was time consuming and inflexible to changes in the scheduling system.
- Incorrect or missed reservations were causing customer dissatisfaction.
The Solution
IT Director Adam Albina began searching for a more streamlined and interactive approach to scheduling. St. Anselm needed something that was affordable, simple to install, and easy to use. Upon receiving a NetSimplicity direct mail postcard, Adam got online and began researching Meeting Room Manager scheduling software. The product was exactly what they’d been looking for and the decision to purchase it was an easy one.
St. Anselm College purchased NetSimplicity’s Meeting Room Manager in January of 2004 and now uses it to schedule equipment for all 700 faculty and staff at the school. This allows for roughly 22 classrooms to be set up for class quickly and efficiently.
The school’s faculty can request overheads, screens, LCD projectors, laptops and more to ensure that they are organized and that their classes run smoothly every day.
Results
Meeting Room Manager has helped St. Anselm College’s room scheduling process to the next level.
- MRM provides a record of the user request and an e-mail confirmation once it is approved. It is immediately posted on the calendar without going through an intermediary.
- The user is able to see if the equipment they want is available at that time or is already available in the room.
- The IT department is able to achieve more accurate and efficient scheduling of its resources.
- Tech support has been very responsive. Any questions are quickly answered within a day or two.