Education Business

Reduce costs and improve efficiency
Jairo Rojas, director general of BASDA, highlights the role of green ICT in meeting government targets for reduction in carbon emissions and shares the views of BASDA members on software priorities within the education sector

ImageThe challenge for the education sector, as with the public sector in general, is to keep IT investment low, while continuing to provide a high quality of service delivery. Particularly with the current government directives on reducing carbon emissions and squeeze on IT budgets, there is a desire for all organisations to make more from the systems they already have to improve efficiencies. It is now becoming widely recognised that the software development industry is the key enabler to achieve the aggressive targets our government has committed to.
    
Ignoring the environmental benefits, being green also makes excellent sense in terms of reducing costs. BASDA is working closely with its members through its BASDA Green Charter, which includes signatories from over 30 BASDA members of all sizes who are already working with their customers to provide real benefits for customers in terms of measuring and managing their green credentials as well as reducing costs and improving efficiency.

Leading the way
The BASDA Green Charter sets out four steps signatories will take to help lead the UK towards achieving a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2020:

  • Take pro-active steps to increase their own carbon efficiency.
  • Enhance their software solutions to help customers become part of a carbon efficient economy.
  • Engage in the debate around green technology, including measurement, reporting, data requirements and standards.
  • Work as an industry through BASDA to educate and increase awareness of green issues as they relate to ICT and business software.
Some of our BASDA members have first-hand experience in working with the education sector to deliver tangible benefits in streamlining processes and working to meet government directives. Bernard Snowe, director of Corero’s Business Systems Division, comments: ”The current high level of investment in Financial Management Software for the schools sector stems from both the growing number of academies and from an increasing trend in all schools to look at more efficient ways of transaction processing and devolving information to various levels of staff and the management team.”

Real-time information
In addition to a wide range of standard accounting modules, there’s increasing demand for having real-time information at the click of a button, so we’re seeing rapidly growing demand for web-based delivery of key financial and management information to senior school managers, departmental budget holders and governors.
    
This process along with web transaction processing e.g. Web Requisitions, staff absence requests, expenses and approvals reduces the need to print, send documents by mail and store a large number of files on site which, in addition to increasing efficiency also fits in perfectly with the schools’ current emphasis on ‘green’ policies.
    
Dinesh Upadhyaya, director of finance and resources at the West London Academy, a user of Corero’s Resource software, says: “From every point of view, the implementation of our Resource system has significantly improved the efficiency of our financial management. In addition to being able to make much more effective use of the budgets available through tighter control, the web portal will enable us to achieve considerable savings through more streamlined purchasing.”
    
Ronald Duncan, Chairman of @UK PLC comments: “e-Procurement within schools and higher education face many of the same challenges seen across other public sector organisations, such as the need to deliver a return on investment and the increasing requirement to be able to track and audit their spend effectively. We have found that some of the best software developments and innovative solutions to these challenges have arisen from working closely with our customers.”
    
For example, Bristol City Council developed a pro-active approach to support their local schools in managing their budgets and accounts. They have recently launched ‘EZPay’, a simple solution providing a fully hosted electronic purchasing system using @UK PLC’s software to all their local schools. It provides an end to end online process for ordering from a selection of goods and services sold by the school and enables online payments.
    
Russell Darling from Bristol City Council adds: “Not only will the system remove the need for pupils to carry cash in school, it will make it easier for parents to pay directly online for school items such as books, trips and uniforms.”

Main drivers for investment
PS Financials supplies accounting and purchasing software to the education sector supplying the core financial, purchasing and budgetary control systems to all of the academy federations, currently 10; to over 70 individual academies and some 40 independent schools throughout the UK. Their recent experience indicates that the main drivers for the schools sector for investing in new Financial Management Software are: improving reporting capabilities, budgetary control, analysis by teaching department, increase efficiency of the finance staff, easier processing of different income stream’s e.g. school trips, hire of facilities etc. and automation of regular routine tasks such as automatic bank reconciliation and automating input. In addition, schools are also looking to evaluate their ‘carbon emissions’ by recording and monitoring information in order to provide a control for carbon emission reduction.
    
COA Solutions provides extended financial management solutions to the education sector incorporating integrated budgeting and forecasting and document management. Mark Thompson, managing director at COA Solutions, comments: “Achieving cost and efficiency savings whilst ensuring greater financial control have always been driving factors behind a school’s decision to invest in financial management software. However, as a result of the government-led drive to reduce organisations’ carbon emissions, the green credentials of financial software systems is another key consideration which is currently driving investment into the more environmentally-friendly solutions. Finance systems with integrated electronic document management, for example, are proving especially appealing to the schools sector as these systems cut paper consumption as well as carbon emissions generated during the printing, photocopying and postage of paper documents.”
    
As an example, COA Solutions supplies the Version One document imaging system, which supports Lincoln College’s green agenda in line with government targets. Paul Allison, finance manager at the college, says: “Colleges are under increasing pressure from the government to cut carbon emissions and make significant efficiency savings and so this was an important consideration when choosing Version One. Since implementing DbArchive, staff no longer have to print out and photocopy invoices several times over, which has dramatically reduced our environmental impact.”

Streamlining processes
Dataflow (UK) Limited supplies financial solutions for the bursar’s office where the greatest demand has been for the ability to access data anywhere, anytime through streamlining all management processes and system data. Martin Axon, head of accounts at Wellington School, comments on the Dataflow system for schools: “The main benefit of the system is practical in terms of the huge reduction in the amount of paperwork generated”.
    
Unit 4 Agresso is a major supplier of Finance and Accountancy systems to the education sector, through its Agresso and CODA product lines. Their IntegrisG2 product helps to maximise efficiency for schools, is easy to use, requires little IT administration time and is cost effective as it can be hosted by the local education authority or as a hosted service to groups of schools, who can access the system via the internet.
    
David Turner, group marketing director for Unit 4 Agresso: “In our experience the key drivers in deploying education systems are low cost of ownership, ease of use, self-service (for budget holders, staff and students) and ease of deployment across the organisaton (including outside the finance department) and across multiple locations.
    
“In practice this requires finance systems that are web based, can be incorporated into existing campus or authority portals, with customisable screens and fieldnames, and with online help to assist non-finance or infrequent users.”

About BASDA
Jairo Rojas is Director General of BASDA, the Business Application Software Developers Association, a UK-based, member-driven organisation that represents business software organisations of all sizes from the world’s largest business software suppliers through to UK headquartered medium and small sized businesses.

For more information
Tel: 01494 868 030
Web: www.basda.org