Bellarmine University

Results

• A holistic approach to advising lets students and advisers focus on the future instead of scheduling and other minutiae 
• Delivering a good registration experience to students is critical  
• Higher ed expertise matters when choosing an ERP provider for a college or university

Summary

When we decided to start looking for a new ERP, we knew that for it ultimately to be successful, this had to be something that the university would support and embrace, our entire community would be behind. So, from an IT standpoint, we certainly had things that we were interested in. But we really tried hard to crowdsource the features that we needed from an ERP.  

We brought together a wide group from across campus to look at what the needs were and to do vendor analysis. One of the things that was important to us was that we found a vendor that was focused on the higher ed vertical so that we didn't have to go through the process of describing all of the specific business processes that are unique to higher ed. But we could look at somebody who brought best practices from our industry to bear.  

In the analysis process, if we picked one feature that was really important to us, the student registration, that was a significant pain point for our institution. Prior to Ellucian Colleague®, our registration really took IT down for about a week. It was really just delivering a bad service to our students. So, we wanted a solution that could provide a great registration experience.  

Beyond registration, the improvement that we've had is really in the holistic approach to advising. So now the students can spend their time with advisors actually mapping out what they want to do in their curriculum. They can talk about what the future looks like, rather than just having to get through the blocking and tackling of setting up a schedule and wasting all their time doing those basic things. So, we make that much more seamless.  

One of the huge advantages to our campus has been just a cultural change in a university embrace of a system with shared governance, where we can all understand that actions that one functional area takes impact another. And we're able to work together in a much more efficient manner to ultimately impact student success.  

We see Ellucian as our most trusted vendor, really a partner with us. And they're our research and development. So Ellucian has the ability to see industry trends. They've got the staff to actually develop solutions and bring those to bear at our university, which is fantastic, because we've got great staff. But we just don't have the capacity to continually innovate.  

So, by taking the talents that we have and coupling that with the innovations that come down from Ellucian, we're able to actually deliver meaningful things to our students, to our faculty, to our staff, and really move our university forward.