Antares

Client Problem:

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is one of the most well recognised research and teaching Universities in Australia. The University was established in 1949 and now caters to over 50,000 students.  

The UNSW Advantage Program encourages students to attain graduate capabilities in co-curricular activities to complement their academic achievements. The University had an existing, manual system overseen and approved by validators for UNSW students to apply for co-curricular activities to be recognised as complementary attainments to their study. This process was time consuming as each student's application was dealt with individually by a University staff member. By nature of human contact, processing was prone to error. The system was costing the University time and money.

UNSW wanted to automate the Advantage Program which was open to all 50,000 UNSW students. By automating the program, UNSW hoped to improve their existing system, reduce errors and costs.

Our Solution:

Antares Solutions proposed the Co-Curricular Online Service & Statement (CCOSS), a completely customised system based on Microsoft SharePoint. The solution provides students and staff with a completely online service to manage student co-curricular activities and approvals that integrated with existing University systems.

This system is a public-facing website built on that allows:

• Students to self-apply for their activities from any computer with internet access
• Validators to quickly monitor and approve activity requests online
• Integration with existing UNSW system.
• Data to be extracted and reports to be created.

Benefits:

The Antares solution, (CCOSS) combines the power of a new application with existing valuable SharePoint features already used at the University. UNSW has benefited from the solution in the following ways:

• Provides an easy to use system for students to apply for co-curricular activities that cuts effort required for student and staff.
• Allows staff and students to track, manage and monitor their activities.
• Reduces error prone, manual approval as the online system can detect human error.
• Removes manual staff costs imposed by the manual system.
• Existing SharePoint infrastructure features, such as authentication and deployments have been utilised in the new, custom built solution.
• Solid and reliable integration with existing third party University student systems that saves user time and effort.

  "The CCOS system and revised business process was a success and the feedback I have received from the users has largely been positive. The success is purely due to the hard work and dedication of the project team. The team was a mix of business people, UNSW IT people from IT Infrastructure and IT Enterprise Systems; and an external partner, Antares Solutions"

Paul Carr

Senior Program Manager, UNSW IT