Shikshan Kranti

This is a case study of an ERP implementation for the Marathwada Shikshan Prasarak Mandal Aurangabad. It has a vast network of educational institutes consisting of around 124 school, high schools, colleges, and junior colleges. It was a great challenge to manage & coordinate the work of all these institutes but we tried our best to givecompetent software that could take care of this huge network. Thus we have this successfully running educational ERP for MSP Mandal."     

The problem

Some of the problems associated with the college Management System were:

Every year, approximately 3000 students enter in each college, which requires a lot of administrative and staff work like Registration of the aspirants, merit list for the admission based on the different parameters including cast based reservations, admission process to be completed in a stipulated time. 

It needs setting up of many departments with specific function to carry out daily activities for the students and the staff. MSP Mandal did have software but either in beats of pieces or partially integrated which resulted in duplication of work. E.g. when student goes to admission counter his data is entered in the software, this same data is again re-entered at different places like library, hostel, laboratories, attendance, accounts etc and resulted in to the mental fatigue of the personnel.

MSP Mandal's management did not have proper control over academic progress and human resource development due to lack of proper & updated information.

Hence managing all the work & communication between various departments became essential and it required lot of paper work. But there were some risks and inconveniences involved in keeping the files in paper form, such as: -

a)      Human labor

b)      Access constraints

c)      Risk of loss

d)      Paper files require significant storage space

     To address the difficulties described above, management not only wanted to integrate all their departments of the college but also wanted to connect all the colleges of MSP Mandal under the one roof. 

     They also wanted to automate their departmental work for better efficiency fas:ter approach, for quick disposal of important task & inter-departmental consultations for the proper coordination. 

The Assignment  

Our consultants were required to develop an electronic workplace that would: 

a) Create College management system

b) Prevent duplication of work

c) Enhance productivity through standard formats

d) Provide seamless connectivity to all departments like (Account, Store, Admission, Fees, and Exam etc.) in a single institute and connect all colleges of "MSP" via web. So that management can monitor and review all-important reports related to different colleges.

e) Include integrating all colleges via web application and enhancing the current college system to make it even more useful, convenient, accurate, and efficient system, that can provide online access to all the stake holder of the educational system like Management, Staff, Students & their Parents.

f) Help in prioritizing the work .

g) Provide a mechanism for sharing of information, knowledge and experiences.

h) Use IT for capturing knowledge & enable better communication through a network.

More than 500 applications were required to be developed to meet these objectives.

The Analysis

The first step was to study the functioning of all the Departments in college. It was then decided that any system that caters to the departments would have to consist of smaller modular applications. Depending on the uniqueness of these applications across departments, they were classified as follows:

Students' Admission: This module takes care of the admission process of students to various classes. The process also includes short entry & detail entry of students. It has got the facility of shifting the students from one class to the other using just the PRN (Permanent Registration Number).

Fees Collection: The module transforms the tedious fee collection process in to a simplified form. This makes the process faster, systematic & more accurate.       

Exam Management: Before the examination, all students have to fill up the admission form; this process will be automated in this module. So exactly how many students are appearing for examination can be reported to Board / University and also the subjects in which students would like to appear etc. also it looks after entire exam management process  right from hall management to seat number sticker printing.

Time Table: There will be two types of timetables one for the Students and other for the Faculty. The complete college timetable will be on system and all faculties can have a look at master as well as class wise timetable. It can generate several types of reports including calculation of Work Load.

Attendance: It can be taken by two methods i.e. either manually or automatically with the help of RFID.

Library Management System: This module is designed as per the norms of the library science.

Academic Progress Management: This module deals with academic progress of the student subject wise. With the help of this module management and faculty will be in a position to trap the academic progress of the class. All the related reports regarding academic progress can be generated. 

Accounts / Asset management: This is one of the most important modules and seamlessly integrated to fees collection, store purchase and event management modules.

Store: This is very important module; there will be one central store that will process all requirements of department/ sub-store.  

Sub-store: In order to set the proper system, concept of the sub store has been introduced. It takes care of departmental sore and linked with main store

Laboratory Management: The module will take care of the equipments/facilities in laboratory, the timetable and various practical that can be conducted, tracking if any breakage/damage of instruments.

Hostel Management: Available rooms in hostels, Mess facilities and occupancy, in and out time of the hosteliets will be shown and monitored by this module.

HR& Payroll: Appointment of new Manpower, Employee records, pension forms, leave record, service book to payroll generation is taken care by this module.

Event Management: This module will have the timetable of various extra curricular events like annual gathering, sports meets, invited lectures etc. Record of all the events there type like sponsored & non sponsored, subject of the event and details of procurement and allocation of fund.

Administration: This module is specially designed to assist Principals of the Colleges. It takes care of the general management such as: Circular System, Mailing System, Technical forum, Institution Diary, Inward/Outward Register and Document Management System & Address Folder.

Property: This module will have information about the total space occupied by building, open space, garden, plan of various building, with date of construction, who is using details etc. This module will also have the latest photographs and maps of buildings, classrooms, and lab.

Scholarship: management and tracking of various scholarships to students and welfare department.

Grants & Funds: Efficient management of grants received from Government and fund management is take care.

Quality Assurance: this module does Communication with NBA/NACC and generation of necessary documents and reports.

Web Portal: This is an optional module, which helps to interact with parent/others online. Some of the features are:  Parent Login, View students' status attendance, Student Application form, Exam application from, Student Result, Alumni details/meet, Time Table of each class for every student to see, Number of student available in each class, Important notices by administration or management. 

KIOSK: This will be Touch screen PC having information about college like courses, fees structure, library information, students attendance, fees pending if any, results, events and news etc. Any students / visitor can access and only view the information from this KIOSK.

Training & Placement: This will take care of the tie-ups of college with local industries for the for campus recruitment.

All central applications, common applications, departmental applications were identified. After an in-depth study of the various departments, the framework was designed with the following components:

A central information system consisting of: 

a) Knowledge management system 

b) Central file system 

c) Central application system

A Departmental information system consisting of:

a) Departmental file system

b) Departmental database 

c) Shared database 

d) Departmental application system 

We also proposed a network management system to manage the network resources, security controls, switches, servers, and other network-based applications such as messaging. The system was planned to cover both the central information system and the departmental information system, and to control the access privileges within a department or across two departments.

The solution

The following diagram depicts the essence of the solution suggested by AMYO:

The technical solution suggested by AMYO based on windods platform with the high-level architecture shown in the diagram 

The architecture has three layers:

Presentation layer: This layer enables navigation, manipulation and translation onto the users' desktops. 

Application layer: This layer consists of an application server and a web server, and a mail server for messaging and workflow in order to provide a collaborative environment. 

Data layer: This layer consists of structured data in the SQL 2005 RDBMS, and unstructured documents 

Project details

Amyo Technology had already started development of its educational ERP product Shikshan Kranti much before the assignment of MSP Mandal's automation.

The project was underdevelopment over a period of five years with a peak team size of 78 apart from the seven domain experts and the consultants.

The team worked as two independent, but closely coordinated groups. One team directed its efforts towards developing a deeper understanding of the numerous technological issues that arose during the development process. It also developed several re-usable components for the use of rest of the team and designed several tools for use in the development environment. They included:

The integrated development environment (IDE) that generated complete applications for the team based on various input parameters. 

The validation engine that automatically generated code for validations

The control access engine, which did the same for access control lists

The tech support system to manage intra-module requests.

A third-party tool, was used to manage the development environment and for code version control. The second team focused on interacting with the various government departments to understand the workflow, seeking suggestions from officials at all the levels, assimilating and translating all of it into a set of requirements for the framework, and subsequently developing the system. The overall project management was handled through Project management tool.

The Payoffs

The Shikshan Kranti yields the following benefits:

Enhanced productivity

Reduced paperwork

Easy access to information

Automatic prioritization of work

The Implementation:

Amyo Technology faced tremendous resistance from the end users. But once they started realizing the benefits of an ERP system they soften their stand and started cooperation with us.  MSP Mandals first college i.e. Deogiri College (strength :15000 students) took three months for the implementation of Shikshan Kranti.

The implementation of the Shikshan Kranti will yield the following benefits:

Knowledge-led governance

Aid in policy formulation

Consistency of applications across all levels

Elimination of data redundancy

Interoperability

Easy flow of information