Published on: Tuesday 9th September, 2014 Greater clarity of data will help to increase success rates and performance

Oaklands College plans to improve efficiency in management reporting by implementing ProMetrix, an integrated dashboard reporting solution from leading IT provider, Compass Computer Consultants (Compass).

Oaklands College, which has around 10,000 students across three sites in Hertfordshire, went live with the reporting software in August 2014. The ProMetrix solution will initially be used by around 40 people in the senior leadership and management teams, and all department heads at Oaklands College. It will then be rolled out to over 500 staff, including course coordinators and tutors, in February 2015.

ProMetrix is an interactive and visual dashboard solution which streamlines management reporting by displaying college Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) extracted from multiple sources in a single web-based system.

Tailored dashboards can be configured to display relevant data for the user depending on their role and includes a suite of reports using data from other Compass products, such as ProAchieve and ProSolution. New reports can also be built using data from Compass software or other systems, such as HR and finance.

The College has integrated its other Compass software, such as its lesson observation and curriculum planning solutions, and its HR, finance, recruitment and funding systems, into ProMetrix. The data from all these areas is now accessible from one system. Previously, users would have to go into each separate system to access the information needed.

Andrew Luck, Business Analyst and Report Writer at Oaklands College, said: "Before rolling out ProMetrix we had all the information needed to create reports…but it was all stored in different systems, which made the process time-consuming and laborious.

"Now, that information will be at our fingertips the moment we login to the system. Part of our strategy is to make processes simpler for our staff and that is exactly what this will do. An efficient system that integrates seamlessly with all our other software will be able to significantly reduce the time spent on reporting and thereby enable staff to focus on more value-added work to further improve the student experience."   

ProMetrix will be used by the College's senior finance team to easily create reports to calculate income and spend for courses to improve financial control. This process was previously done on spreadsheets using data from different solutions and took several weeks. Using ProMetrix the report will be created automatically by importing data from funding software and the student management and information system, and will be available from the moment the web page is opened.

The system  will also be used to display a Management Information Systems (MIS) dashboard that covers all the information that would be needed should the College be audited or inspected, in addition to an automated dashboard for the Quality team, which previously relied on reports compiled from spreadsheets which quickly became outdated.

Oaklands College is also planning to use ProMetrix for its enrolment process. Historically the College has not easily been able to track its live enrolment figures across the site.

Luck commented: "We have been looking into implementing a dashboard solution like ProMetrix for some time but until now we had not found a suitable system. We already used nine other Compass solutions so it seemed the logical choice to investigate what Compass could offer.  We were impressed with the capability of ProMetrix, its intuitive interface and how easy it was to use - we believe it to be the best dashboard available for further education."

Compass is an Advanced Computer Software Group company.

distributed by