It's Later Than You Think

Fans of the podcast "S-Town" might remember John B. McLemore talking about sundials and their ominous messages.  This one resonated with me - It's later than you think. 

First, if you haven’t heard "S-Town," you need to - it's a terrific podcast.

Second, it's later than you think is a message that higher education needs to remember.

If you've been in higher education for a while, you know that the available methods of interacting with prospective students have changed - really changed - and will continue to do so with every passing term.  Gone are the days when students stood in line to register, or let's face it, actually read an email.  Colleges compete for their attention with so many different invisible sources.  Students engage for a second, and then they're gone.

Colleges and universities are changing too, but are lagging behind potential and current students and their expectations for customer service and instantaneous information. Students are more distracted and yesterday's one-size-fits-all solutions just don't work anymore. The data that will allow colleges to interact with students on a more granular level exists, but it needs to be easier to access and use.  

Most, if not all, colleges and universities are tied to a central system to do their daily work - ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.  Those ERPs are aging, fast, but they are not easily replaced.  As a result, colleges are finding alternate ways of getting work done and common functions of ERPs are being replaced with sleek, more user-friendly software.  The problem is, all these new software systems have to play nice with the central ERP.

Budget cycles, red tape and system-wide decisions often prevent colleges and universities from purchasing tools that will help them explore and leverage their own student and financial data.  And, if institutions make it around those hurdles, they may find software solutions that seem good during the demo, but later prove ineffective because they don't really interact with the existing ERP - or worse yet, take years to get off the ground because of long-term implementation periods.

At FundFive, we understand these complex issues.  We have years of experience working with multiple complex ERP systems. We’ve created all our products with these challenges in mind.  We know what institutions need because we've been there.  We make products that interact with existing ERPs and use the strength of those existing systems to create tools that work, right away, to deliver desired results.

It's later than you think.  If institutions wait on one all-encompassing system to be included in an annual budget, bid, purchased and implemented, they'll have missed perhaps years of better service for students and data-driven decision making.  We suggest augmenting existing ERPs with solutions designed to interact with them seamlessly.