Lahore College of Arts and Sciences (LACAS) is one of the largest school networks in Pakistan. The institute was established in order to achieve the vision of providing equal educational opportunities to girls and hence, in 1987, LACAS become the first institute to offer A-Level education to girls. The school has been recognised as a centre of excellence on multiple platforms and has continuously been pushing the frontiers of school education.
Initiative Overview and Rationale
LACAS was using a home grown legacy Student Information System (SIS) with a limited feature set to support a small portion of its financial and academic operations. This stand-alone disconnected and inflexible desktop system faced challenges in data consistency and consolidation across LACAS campuses. Moreover, there was poor inter-departmental communication and organizational cohesion suffered as a result.
The Admissions process was cumbersome as it was limited to the Head Office branch only and parents could not avail this facility from campuses near their residence.
The existing SIS was also able to only provide minimal financial operations support as there was no automated method of generating fee bills, fee waivers, bill revisions or late fee calculations. The school used hand filled printed templates in order to produce student fee bills. Additionally, LACAS was unable to implement standardized policies for the issuance of fee waivers through the existing SIS and the waivers were being issued on an ad hoc basis per student.
Problems were also faced when accessing the SIS for updating information from remote campuses which resulted in a lot of rework and inconsistent information.
Project Goals
Given that the existing IT systems implemented at LACAS were not integrated, robust, customizable or secure, there was a growing consensus within management that the school required an advanced Campus Management Solution (CMS) that would cater to their school specific needs. LACAS was eager to find a solution that would streamline its existing operations and also be able to keep up with its evolving needs in the future.
LACAS required a Campus Management Solution (CMS) that would aid implemention of standardized business policies across branches. The system needed to be accessible from all campuses and provide a holistic organizational visibility of operational strengths and weaknesses. The system was also required to automate and facilitate the manual activities of Admissions and Financials such as students’ fee voucher and waiver generation, fee revision and late fee calculation.
After a thorough and exhaustive evaluation process, LACAS selected AlmusNet’s Campus on Cloud School Edition (CoC SE).
CoC School Edition Steps in
Campus on Cloud School Edition (CoC SE) is a Campus Management and Student Information System for K-12 Schools and Colleges. It is the school specific version of Campus on Cloud (CoC), AlmusNet’s flagship CMS Solution for Higher Education Institutions. CoC SE retains all the strengths and features of CoC while offering additional capabilities specific to K-12 level education.
The solution has been developed by a team experienced in implementing CMS at over 40 educational institutions across 10 countries. Moreover, CoC SE has been built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and delivers rich functionality in a highly secure solution with a stunning user interface.
A team of AlmusNet’s Functional experts recently took the Core, Admissions and Financials modules in CoC SE live at LACAS. CoC SE is helping LACAS by streamlining operations and decision making for its executive and administrative management. The administrative structure of the school network, its multiple brands, campuses and schools within each campus was optimized. Furthermore, Data Migration of the active students, instructors and classes was carried out.
CoC SE also transformed the K-12 institute’s Admissions processes in the following ways:
- Having a considerable number of pre-school students, LACAS required an information framework that would particularly contain the pick-up and emergency contact details for those students. CoC SE provided the ideal solution with its Student Profile Management system which now maintains the pick-up and emergency contacts details, as well as information about parents, class teachers, siblings, sponsors and/or guardians.
- As school students are distributed in class sections with their associated classrooms, section teachers, timetables and other resources, CoC SE introduced the sections feature and successfully allocated the admitted students into their respective class sections.
- Through CoC SE, LACAS was able to provide the admissions facility at all branches in a consistent and centrally managed process.
For the Financials module, CoC SE fully automated key processes and implemented changes in the following ways:
- LACAS lacked a standardized financial management system and granted fee waivers on an impromptu basis. CoC SE was used to standardize thirteen Fee structures, along with Fee Waiver policies and Late Fee regulations in order to have a uniform financial management structure.
- Since LACAS is a school with a high billing frequency, CoC SE was used to set up an automated Monthly and Bi-Monthly tuition calculation and fee bill generation process.
- LACAS had to manually revise the fee bills and calculate the amount of late fee which caused confusion and inconvenience. To combat this problem, CoC SE provided Automated Late Fee Calculations along with a Fee Revision system which provides the flexibility to change the due date on a student’s fee bill in order to enhance convenience for parents.
- Detailed Financial Reports were delivered to the management via intuitive dashboards in order to assist informed decision making.
Key Contributions and Next Steps
Campus on Cloud School Edition (CoC SE) completely transformed the Admissions and Financial management framework for LACAS by enabling the school to attain a standardized and integrated mechanism for managing its key business processes and the associated data. The school has been successfully billing students and the automation of financial processes enabled it to save a significant amount of time and mitigate any possible discrepancies. Moreover, the facilitation of admissions from all the campuses resulted in a higher number of applications.
After seamless implementation of CoC SE’s core, LACAS now plans to go live with the Academics module and automate key academic processes such as Student attendance, Student Performance Reports, Class Time Tables, Class Teacher allocation, and various other activities in order to further upgrade its Operations.