New system to provide online services to students, faculty and staff
OXFORD,
Miss. – The University of Mississippi has successfully used the SAP
Student Lifecycle Management system for more than five years on its
Oxford, Southaven and Tupelo campuses, so when the university’s Medical
Center campus began searching for a new management system, it looked
first at the SAP application.
The Medical Center is implementing Student Lifecycle Management to replace its legacy system to provide enhanced services for students, residents, faculty, staff and alumni, said Kathy Gates, chief information officer on the Oxford campus. The application will operate from the Oxford campus data center, she said.
The Student Lifecycle Management application provides a range of functions from recruitment and admission to schedule building, registration, grading and student accounting.
“Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Mississippi is committed to finding the most efficient and effective way of operating in our increasingly interconnected world,” Chancellor Robert Khayat said. “We see this expansion to our Medical Center in Jackson as a further sign of our commitment to provide the most effective learning environment possible for our students, residents and faculty.”
When operational, the Student Lifecycle Management application is to provide the Medical Center’s 3,170 students, residents and faculty with online access to critical information and services.
Students can access an array of self-service features to help them manage processes such as registration, bill payment and financial aid. Faculty and staff can view dynamic class rolls, submit grades and access information for advising. Also, the application allows students and faculty to perform a degree audit online and simulate what-if situations for possible changes of program specialization.
UM was the North American pilot for the SAP Student Lifecycle Management system. University officials chose SAP in 1998 to replace outdated administrative computer systems, providing a unified network that handles student service and information, human resources, Physical Plant work orders, payroll and many other functions.
Other institutions using the system include the University of Newcastle in England, Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, University of Zurich in Switzerland and University of Kentucky.
Because the university already uses SAP on its other campuses, the Medical Center can dramatically reduce its expected implementation time.
“Since we are collaborating and integrating with the university’s current SAP landscape, we expect to achieve a number of milestones within the next few months and have our full student system live by October 2009,” said David Fowler, director of academic information systems at the Medical Center. “We believe that the flexibility and scalability of the SAP Student Lifecycle Management application will allow us to accomplish our implementation quickly and cost-effectively.”
The Medical Center in Jackson houses schools of Medicine, Nursing, Health Related Professions, Dentistry and Graduate Studies in the Health Sciences; the University Hospitals and Health System; and the Rowland Medical Library. The Medical Center employs 7,500 people, including 858 faculty, making it the second-largest employer in Hinds County.
UM has selected LSI Consulting, a professional services firm specializing in implementing new technology for higher education institutions, to assist with the Medical Center’s switch to the SAP Student Lifecycle Management application.
For more information on SAP, go to http://www.sap.com/usa/index.epx . For more information on the UM Medical Center, go to http://www.umc.edu/ .