Higher Education Timetabling & Procurement event success

Amid unprecedented change in the software landscape for timetabling platforms, more and more institutions are considering their systems strategy and thinking about changing supplier. Implementing a new timetabling platform is not an easy change project, either from an IT perspective or from the wider organisational change perspective. It takes longer than you expect and is not without significant risk.

So, to help the sector deliver such change more effectively, SUMS and SUPC hosted a series of events for the timetabling and procurement communities.

Thank you to the following suppliers for participating in the series:

TechnologyOne Syllabus+

TechnologyOne covered different functional use cases from data collection to manual scheduling, student allocation to reporting. The demonstration highlighted the additional cloud-based functionality that TechnologyOne has invested in over the past couple of years.

Celcat

Celcat experts ran through a range of functionality from different user views from scheduling to reporting. Of particular interest was the student mobile responsive view, demonstrating how students can self-allocate to small group teaching sessions.

Semestry

Semestry demonstrated their TermTime software. They highlighted the wide breadth of functionality available across the Tribal application landscape and how this can support an integrated approach to delivering the functionality required by the use cases.

Infosilem Berger-Levrault

Infosilem colleagues walked us through their academic course scheduling software from different user views. They demonstrated the customisation available on the dashboards and introduced us to their dynamic reports.

TimeEdit

TimeEdit gave an informative run through of their suite of timetabling related functionality. They showed the value of interconnectedness across the suite and the ease of working with a variety of constraints when scheduling.

EventMAP

EventMAP showed us how permissions can be applied to devolve particular tasks to departmental users and how AI is employed within the scheduling engine. Also how decision support tools can be used to aid manual scheduling, and how students (or someone on their behalf) can self-select onto group sessions.

Procurement best practice session

This session brought together a number of different perspectives: category manager, timetabler, project manager and supplier.  Key messages from all: get started early, be clear about what you want the product to achieve for you and build partnerships with your chosen supplier. 

Thank you to all contributors to our Spring Procurement in Timetabling Series. It was great to see the suppliers demonstrate their systems and then to bring it all together in a final session focusing on the procurement journey.  

Help with your timetabling and procurement activity

SUMS Consulting has helped a number of Universities through the procurement and implementation of a new timetabling system. Please contact Claire Taylor, Managing Consultant (s.c.taylor@reading.ac.uk) or Mark Lewis, SUPC ICT Category Manager (m.r.lewis@reading.ac.uk) if you have any questions about the series or would like to talk about how SUMS or SUPC could support you.