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In a globally competitive set-up, where education is becoming a hot favorite vertical for IT deployment, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) has been an early bird. The technology institute is striving to reframe strategies to focus on its core business of assessing student population and addressing various campus related problems using technology.

Need for IT
"For some time now we had been feeling the pressure to measure, analyze, and report on many aspects of the student population," says Mohan Kumar, systems manager, Vellore Institute of Technology. "The all very fragmented student's data, increasing global competition for students, faculty and increasing regulatory requirements, have been driving the need to have an insight and analysis," he adds.

The VIT comprises of seven schools offering 17 undergraduate programs, 28 post graduate programs, and research programs, leading to M Phil and PhD degrees.

	'We believe that with this kind of insight, we will be able to make the right strategic decisions to maximize student recruiting efforts, improve retention rates, analyze faculty workloads...'
	-Mohan Kumar, systems manager, Vellore Institute of Technology

VIT is in the process of deploying Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solution. The solution at VIT captures detailed student-related information into a single environment, and combines it with complex analysis of its recruiting, admissions, student records and student financials data. "We realized that our systems required to be process driven, and not dependent on individuals," says Kumar.

"We believe that with this kind of insight, we will be able to make the right strategic decisions to maximize student recruiting efforts, shorten time-to-graduation, improve retention rates, identify successful and unsuccessful courses and programs, analyze faculty workloads, and more tightly manage and track tuition awards and payments," says Kumar.

"Right now we have all the processes in different departments. With this solution we integrate all the processes and have a single window view of all the processes," he adds.

The Transformation
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Warehouse is a part of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite, an integrated suite of analytic applications. "It basically helps managers formulate strategies to meet and align with institutional goals, actively monitor day-to-day operations, and collaborate across the academic enterprise," says AM Seshagiri, GM, government/education/healthcare vertical, Oracle.

Kumar points out that services related to financial details of the students are also provided. The other thing that the solution takes care of is the access of information to parents. Also, it includes student's residential management system which looks into the complaints that a student files.

The inventory model, on the other hand looks into the various aspects of the material purchase by the various departments of the institute.

Besides this, the campus plans to have a robust IT infrastructure. It already has over 3,000 machines, 200 workstations and 70 servers, which includes IBM Blade series, E-series servers, Sun servers and SGA workstations. "We have in all 23 buildings connected with fibre," says Kumar. "The fibre have been laid down, however, we are in the process of getting Wi-Fi connectivity. The project will take about 3-4 months," adds Kumar.

"The department of Centre for Technology infrastructure supports all the seven schools IT infrastructure," says Kumar. The entire campus' hardware, networking and software application is managed by this department.

The institute started its IT deployment about six months back. Kumar says that it will take another year for the institute to complete campus solution IT deployment as it is being done in a phased manner.

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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