Streamlining Processes and Empowering Users with a Modern ERP

Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC) is both the oldest and the newest community college in New Mexico. Established in 1950, the college became an independent public institution in 2021. Going independent meant SENMC no longer had access to their former ERP, so a strenuous ERP search ensued. With the goal of having a solution in place in time for the following year’s spring registration, they sought an ERP that could meet their aggressive timeline while also streamlining processes and empowering users.

Anthology’s Student Information & Enterprise Resources met SENMC’s implementation timing goals and delivered modern and interconnected SaaS solutions that will continue to improve the institution’s efficiency and user experience.

Anthology partnered with the institution to ensure the successful and effective implementation of their student information system (SIS)—Anthology® Student—and ERP planning tools—Anthology® Finance & HCM and Anthology® Payroll. SENMC has gone live with Student and continues to finalize other modules. “Anthology has really been there with us every step of the way as we have been working through this aggressive timeline,” said Juanita Garcia, vice president of student services at SENMC. “They have been guiding us. They've been supportive. Anything that we needed to change, they helped us troubleshoot, they helped us figure out anything that we were struggling with, and we were learning a lot of configuration that we've never done.”

Part of the implementation process includes demonstrating to the institution how the modules interact. “We realized Anthology wasn't just giving us a system. They were showing us how it worked so we can understand. We weren't just getting, ‘Here's your box; go figure it out,’” said Karla Volpi, executive vice president and vice president of business & finance at SENMC. “We were helped through figuring out if I do this here, that's going to affect this over there.”

Anthology developed an implementation schedule and met with SENMC weekly to review the different parts of the system together. Spreadsheets were shared with the institution showing pass or fail testing for every completed configuration. “They helped us connect the dots even more. As we started testing and seeing if things were not working, we would fix that—and we got direction on how to do that. And if it was something that Anthology needed to support, then they took care of it fairly quickly. Part of that aggressive timeline was getting our testing completed,” said Garcia.

SENMC worked to ensure that the student experience was not interrupted by the implementation of the new system. After going live with Anthology Student, the institution found that students could navigate the new system more easily than expected, especially considering that they had been using a different university system. “We had different questions from students regarding navigating that [previous] system. However, with Student, they seem to just be able to figure it out,” said Garcia.

SENMC is looking forward to the automation and control Anthology solutions will bring to the institution. Available features will enable customization of the system to improve the experience of students and staff. “Instead of my staff doing tedious work, they're going to actually be able to have the time to read dashboards, get reports that are using data on a daily basis to drive decisions, to guide students for enrollment, for recruitment, that's what we're really looking forward to,” said Garcia.

Recently, SENMC went live with Anthology Finance. Plans are in place to go live with Anthology Payroll in January. A streamlined and interconnected system with similar interfaces will enable more efficiency for SENMC. “A lot of institutions had very distinct silos, like this is finance, and this is student services, and this is advising. Because of the way that we implemented this, we don't have the silos that we did,” said Volpi.

SENMC plans to leverage Power BI to capture data and further improve campus efficiency and processes. “There's a very specific form that we have to submit our financial information to the state, and in the past, it has included reams and reams of spreadsheets and hand-keying numbers in,” said Volpi. “I can make that report spit out the way it needs to look. I'm not there yet, but I've been able to do the sorting, and I can see that it's there. So next year, ask me, and I'll probably be, you know, doing backflips about the fact that I didn't have to hand key all of the budget information in.”

SENMC is also incorporating Anthology® Reach into their system. The CRM and lifecycle engagement solution works with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help institutions manage admissions, student success, retention, and more. “We're struggling with the way we're handling admissions applications now, and so we're excited to be able to see Reach come into the game. We're learning that the information that we have in Student is being pulled back into Reach, and it's helping us with reporting. It's going to help us in so many different ways, not just recruitment and enrollment, but also retention,” said Garcia. “It's going to help us with identifying students who are struggling. We're going to be able to keep track of a student's history from the time they submitted an RFI to the time they graduated.”