College of North West London drives digital strategy forward with Advanced’s software

The College of North West London is set to go live with ProResource, Advanced’s financial and resource planning solution, as it looks to bring disparate systems together. The system is currently being piloted ahead of a full rollout in January 2017, and forms part of a wider strategy to embrace digital technology to drive efficiencies.

The College of North West London delivers a wide range of vocational courses and qualifications to around 11,000 students every year. Alongside courses for school leavers, the College is also a major provider of apprenticeships and adult learning opportunities, including professional updating programmes. It employs over 400 staff across two campuses in the London Borough of Brent.

As part of a strategy to improve efficiency and streamline its IT systems, the College is deploying ProResource to improve the way it manages and analyses finances and resources. The solution was selected based on Advanced’s strong reputation in the sector as well as recommendations from staff and colleagues from other further education colleges who had experience of the system.

ProResource will primarily be used by curriculum management staff for curriculum planning and monitoring class sizes, enabling the College to analyse its income, identify gaps and assess how cost-effective different courses are. Currently this is done using spreadsheets but following a successful pilot the system is due to be rolled out across the entire college in January 2017, in time for the 2017/2018 academic year.

It will also integrate with the College’s management information system (MIS) to provide all users with consistent and up-to-date data on the College’s resources. With ProResource, users can drill down to analyse income and expenditure at different levels, making it quicker and easier to produce comprehensive reports.

Marc Jordan, Assistant Principal at the College of North West London, says, “Using ProResource will give our staff easy access to live information all in one place, rather than having people emailing different versions of spreadsheets back and forth. It will be a much more effective way of working and will give us more accurate and detailed information on our finances and where our money is coming in and going out.”

The College of North West London is already familiar with Advanced’s technology having used ProAchieve since 1999 for tracking and analysing learner achievement. It recently added the target setting module, replacing a Microsoft Access database, as it looks to increase its use of digital technology to improve efficiency and bring together disparate systems.

The organisation is also looking into some of Advanced’s other specialist solutions for further education colleges, including its management information system (MIS) ProSolution, its lesson observation solution ProObserve and its CRM system ProEngage.

“As well as looking to make greater use of the functionality that ProAchieve offers, we are also considering implementing other Advanced solutions as part of our wider strategy to streamline the way that we work.

“The company has an excellent reputation across the sector and having multiple products from the same supplier means that our IT systems are more integrated, which saves us considerable amounts of time and therefore money,” adds Marc.

“Advanced’s technology gives us reliable data which makes reporting easier and just makes life easier for the staff that use it. This benefits students too because with more reliable, detailed data we can address issues more quickly and proactively.”

Advanced is one of the UK’s leading providers of innovative IT management systems for further education colleges, with its ProAchieve solution being used by 90% of all colleges in the UK.

*Compass was renamed Advanced on April 11, as part of a global rebrand.