Edu-leaders

Founded in 1991, Institute for Technology and Management (ITM) Business School is one of the first private, not-for-profit, non-aided business schools in India. In founding ITM, Dr. P.V. Ramana, the Chairman, envisioned that ITM would not be a single location Business School, rather a network of several Business School campuses that provided the ITM Quality of Management Education in major cities across India. ITM being a Technology Institute totally depends on technology in order to manage the business in a professional manner. All the Centers of ITM are well connected with its Corporate Office and various activities of the day to day operations are managed through an in-house developed ERP. The front end of the ERP is Java and the back end is PostgressSQL.

Mainly their activities are on MS-Office and they use Excel, Word and Power Point. Their ERP supports MS-Office. ITM is also exploring the possibilities of a specific Statistical Software like SPSS or SYSTAT depending on the requirement.

The ERP has various modules like admissions, accounts, library, academics and examinations. Before implementing the ERP, they gave training to their faculty and staff in the usage of the technology. In case of any problem with the operational part of ERP, their IT Department resolves the issues either over the phone or by visiting the site personally.

As the basic objective of the technology is to make the job more effective and efficient, by introducing the ERP, they were able to manage business better. As a part of admissions process the candidate is told on the spot about her status on the merit / wait list based on the inputs given to the ERP which enables the student to take a decision to join the Program. After the selection process, the candidate pays the fee to the Admissions Department in Mumbai, and the respective center gets the details of the candidate with full particulars through the ERP along with the hard copy of the dossier. From then onwards the faculty updates the records. Periodic reports are generated about the students and are sent to parents. Banks will insist on the period reports in case any student has taken Education Loan and ITM will submit a report, in case required.

As the total ERP is developed by in-house members from IT Department, the cost was not an issue. All the members of IT Department were involved in the project and the training modules given to other faculty and staff were considered as a part of their responsibilities. The estimated figure, including training and manpower of the ERP team would be around 50 lacs. It took two years to develop and one year to implement the admissions, academic and examination modules in various centers. Other modules are in various stages of implementation. The extent of implementation in the above three modules is also not uniform across programs and locations. The ERP has several modules like Admissions, Accounts, Library, Academics, and Examinations.

Before implementing the ERP, they have given training to their faculty and staff in the usage of the technology. In case of any problem with the operational part of ERP, the IT Department resolves the issues either over the phone or by visiting the site personally. Accessibility is given to the coordinators of the various functional areas to the relevant modules for data management. As the basic objective of the technology was to make the job more effective and efficient, by introducing the ERP, ITM was able to manage business in a better manner. Even though they are operating various modules of the ERP, they are still planning to work on some more initiatives. They plan to allow parents to access the progress reports of their ward directly. Similarly, ITM is also working to give the same reports to the students directly; currently they are handing out the hard copy of the report. One more aspect they are trying to initiate is the possibility of normalized grades through the ERP sometime in the future.