Higher Education

Problems with the Higher Education Institutions

Today American higher education institutions are facing mounting challenges with state and federal funding, rising costs, recruiting, onboarding and student graduation rates, and declining world rankings. There isn’t another “industry” that churns it’s “clients” by upwards of 40% each year like that seen with students in higher education.

Solution Providing

Brightpoint Infotech has completed dozens of higher education ERP implementations.  We’ve also partnered with Anthology (aka, Campus Management), a well known student and faculty management solution that is fully integrated with Dynamics 365.  In those instances, we manage the entire project and the core ERP functions related to financials, grants, human capital management, procurement, etc., while Campus Management focuses on the student and faculty applications.  Our implementation model and process ensure a successful implementation that’s also financially efficient.

Dynamics 365 has also provided and continued to update an Education Accelerator which exposes and enables creative customizations (using the Power Platform and low/no code development) to allow partners like Brightpoint Infotech to help higher education institutes to stay competitive.

Key Findings

We’ve implemented D365 at higher education institutions across the US, from faith based to public and private to small and large colleges and universities. And the 2020 pandemic has reinforced the importance of visibility and reporting that only a fully integrated ERP system can provide in a timely and accurate way.

• Campus Management and D365 are both awesome and very complimentary. Campus Management is well suited for tending to the faculty and student needs while D365 handles financials, payroll, procurement, reporting and other ERP functional areas (inventory, budget, procurement, etc.).
• Portals and self service are vital. In a world/industry constantly requiring less to do more, having self-service portals that enable the scaling and re-use of vital information is vital. As needs change, the Power Platform will be a great way to complement and extend D365 to meet these needs.
• Up to date Financial Reporting and visualizations served up by PowerBI provide the real-time insight administrators need to manage the most important aspects of their university.
• Related to above but expense visibility and versus budget comparison reporting were commonly appreciated insight.