In this latest customer interview Matthew Rowe tells us about all of the interesting ways Rollbase is being put to use at Hayton College in Australia to do things that historically required bulkier ERP systems such as PeopleSoft:
Rollbase: What kind of organization is Hayton College Pty Ltd?
Matt: Hayton College is a private college that provides training to the travel and tourism industry. Established in Australia in 1976, we are now an online-only educator with students all around the world.
Rollbase: What kind of applications are you building using Rollbase?
Matt: As a training college, management of student records is a big issue for us. Our students' results need to be stored for 30 years by legislation, but in practicality that means we design our systems to store them permanently. We still have students we trained decades ago contacting us for copies of results or Certificates, so we need to be able to retrieve them easily.
The first application we developed, then, was to rebuild our student database in Rollbase - storing enrollments, grades etc.
We looked at other areas where Rollbase could help, and one of the simplest ones was to manage the initial sales enquiry process. While most of this process is handled by our trainers over email or the phone, a Rollbase portal on our website captures the initial enquiry - creates a sales lead, notifies a trainer, and then uses workflow to track the process.
We have big plans for our Rollbase apps - we're building a series of templated communications at the moment to manage everything from student support to invoices, and plan to integrate Rollbase with our learning management system to automate enrollments and grade transfers. The main feature we're looking forward to rolling out is a full student portal for them to access their details. While many university students might be familiar with student portals from Peoplesoft or the like, this type of functionality just hasn't been available to organisations our size in the past.
Rollbase: What kind of applications were you using before Rollbase?
Matt: An inefficient mix of Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and hard copies.Rollbase: What problems did you face that caused you to look for a platform like Rollbase? Did Rollbase solve these problems?
Matt: Hayton College operates largely as a virtual corporation - our staff are distributed, and our plans for international expansion make traditional systems difficult to implement reliably and securely. We are too small for a traditional ERP system, or even a web-based open source one. The cost of customisation and implementation, and then the cost to support ongoing was always too high. The ease of customisation of Rollbase and the price were the main selling points for us. I could (reasonably) quickly build the apps we needed without development resources, and our staff can access the systems worldwide.
Rollbase: What are your favorite Rollbase features?
Matt: There are many. The ease of building objects and the relationships between them; portals; workflow; templates and integration codes; the ability to customise pretty much everything.
Rollbase: What features would you like to see Rollbase add to it's platform?
Matt: There are many features we'd like to see: use of our own domain names; built-in multi-currency support; a "development environment" to make changes to the applications and then roll out only when it's complete. It has been a problem for us at the moment that we're designing and experimenting with new features on "production" applications and live data. This means we probably haven't pushed the system as far as it could go for us, and it also means we've had to keep running our old systems in parallel as backup. Of course - we knew when we purchased that the system was still in beta.
The other big feature group we'd like to see added would be financials and accounting.
Rollbase: Would you recommend Rollbase to a friend or colleague in your own personal network?
Matt: Absolutely! Aside from being a fantastic product, the support we've received from Rollbase has been amazing. Ricardo and Matt in particular have gone out of their way - it's obvious that this is a company that understands its clients' needs, and does what it can to help them.
We have a lot of faith in the product and the team, and we hope to be there when Rollbase IPOs to say we were there from the beginning!
All the best,
Matt & the team at Hayton College
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