News & Events
Fusion goes to top of the form at Wirral Metropolitan College
Like universities and colleges up and down the country, Wirral Metropolitan College's twice-yearly intake in September and January meant thousands of enrolment forms and a major administrative headache for the registry team.
Inputting the forms took several weeks, so that basic data, such as the number of students enrolled was not available until the end of the year.
The college, which has 15,000 students on full- and part-time courses, had already taken steps to streamline the paper-based enrolment process. When Denise Readdie, Wirral's MIS manager joined the college, a real-time system for capturing basic student and course data at the point of enrolment was just going live.
Although the new system was a marked improvement, the second stage of data input was taking a team of six registry staff two months to complete.
After an introduction by one of Formic's business partners, the college implemented a solution based on Fusion.
The forms are completed in the enrolment hall as before with the essential first-stage data keyed on completion, but the second-stage data is now captured with Fusion. The double-sided A3 form needed only minor modifications to make it fit for scanning and the entire capture process can be completed by one member of staff in the space of a month; a 12-fold productivity gain over the previous process.
Another benefit is that the registry team has more time free for query resolution with the result that data accuracy is at an all-time high.
Denise is pleased with the outcome but also complimentary about the way Formic handled the project. "What was really important for me was the helpdesk support staff - they were absolutely brilliant and helped me get back on track every time," she says.
Potential future developments include adding barcodes to course labels, scanning at the point of enrolment and using Formic's Web Forms module to put the enrolment form on-line.