Lady Margaret Hall

Like other Oxford Colleges, Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) is part of a collegiate system whereby the students are members of Oxford University and the College, and details of accommodation are dealt with independently of the admitting body. Information has to be transferred between systems and data handling can be tedious and time consuming. LMH meets problem solving head-on, and are keen to embrace technology for the benefit of the College and, most importantly, the students.

Bart Ashton, Domestic Bursar at LMH, said: “We wanted to automate and minimise handling of data, particularly duplication, which was taking an inordinate amount of time and always has the potential to create errors.”

Eliminate Double Handling
The College has been using Kinetic’s KxConferencing software for six years to manage its conferencing activities, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it implemented KxStudent to manage student accommodation. The main reason Kinetic software was selected was down to its integration capability, which meant duplication and double-handling was eliminated from the outset.

The College can directly import information from the University’s main system and using KxStudent make allocations straight away. KxStudent uses data taken from UCAS entries without the need to re-enter it. Not only does this save time, but it dramatically reduces the error count. Last year, for the first time, accommodation agreements could be emailed, and students could download instructions and information from the website rather than waiting for this to be posted.

Financial integration saves months
Prior to LMH having KxStudent, billing £1.4 million a year was, according to Bart Ashton, “Difficult. We had issues with data accuracy, which spilled into billing, and we had to make a lot of time consuming manual corrections.”

The integration with the finance system is probably the area where KxStudent has provided the greatest payback for LMH – in terms of time and money saved, and creating greater efficiency. The College bills termly and this now goes straight onto the student’s account, which has improved cash flow. Bart said: “We get paid pretty much on time, and our accuracy and our ability to reconcile our accounts has dramatically improved.”

“The finance office was spending several days a month working out rents. It can now be done by pushing a few buttons. We estimate that this alone has saved us between two weeks and a month every year.”

Flexibility allows Creativity
LMH has also been creative in the way in which they use Kx by setting up the system so that students can view their own battels (Members’ Bursary accounts) on their Intranet. Issues can be dealt with immediately, rather than at the end of term, or, worse, at the end of a year, when staff would have to plough through months’ of paperwork.

In terms of the implementation itself, LMH worked with Kinetic on a project plan, which went through on time, and everything happened as expected. “You could say it did exactly what it says on the tin,” said Bart.

In addition, LMH’s staff were already familiar with Kinetic’s software so the learning curve was very short indeed.  Implementing KxStudent means the Hall can now concentrate on what it should be doing – offering a great service to its students.

“Kinetic take a strong collaborative approach – they’re clearly interested in their product and the way in which people are using it so that they can develop the software to make it work better. They’re obviously in this for the long-term.”

The Challenge
Transferring data between different programmes and systems was the main issue faced by LMH. It meant information was being duplicated and was, therefore, subject to potential errors and was taking up valuable time. The problem was particularly pronounced when linking to the College’s financial systems.

The Solution
 Kinetic Solutions’ KxStudent product was chosen by the College because of its strong integration features. The software can be configured to import information from and export data to most other software, eliminating the need for duplication and double-handling. For LMH this meant integration with student records system OSS, and Navision - their finance system

The Outcome
Weeks and, in the case of finance, months of man-hours have been saved. Tasks that would previously have created numerous issues can now be carried out at the push of a button, and data needed for accounting and other purposes is available within minutes. Data accuracy and cashflow has also significantly improved.

Products and Technology
The integrated suite of products at Lady Margaret Hall includes:
•KxStudent
•KxConferencing
•Interface into the student records system OSS
•Interface into the College finance system Navision
•Windows 2003 server using MS SQL server 2005