About Education

UK Post 16 Education plays a crucial role in the ambitions of economic and social success through its development of the skills and talents of young people and adults. We all require more innovation and more collaboration as new and effective partnerships and ways of working are forged, ensuring that both Further and Higher Education can respond to the challenges ahead. This includes the development of new business models which reflect and respond to the new operating environment and are capable of making the most of the new opportunities open to colleges and other training providers.

Crimson believes that our business model reflects the need for more focused engagement in key business critical areas, where the need to maximise the current investment in systems is paramount for all institutions. Our solutions are based on nearly 20 years of experience in delivering applications and services to the sector, from core financial management solutions, pre-incorporation, right up to some of the most state of the art intranet and extranet projects we are delivering this year.

Our vision is to take industry standard products and deliver, innovative, functionality rich, end user solutions that takes account of many years sector experience.

Our business technology platforms are based around the following key applications:-

• Dynamics Relationship management – CRM
• Dynamics GP – Financial management
• Sharepoint 2010
• Document Management
• Intranet and Extranet
• Collaboration
• Publishing and Internet
• Business Intelligence
• Performance Management

CRM for the Education Sector

As the vast majority of today’s Colleges continually strive to increase student loyalty and ensure each year's targets and budgets are hit, the need to gain a competitive advantage over competition and gain a true competitive edge is key to current stability and future growth.

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management Software from Crimson provides educational institutions with a repository to store information relating to all their contacts, whether they are suppliers, customers, partners or competitors. CRM provides institutions with a method of improving efficiency across campus. Building relationships with “customers” to ensure loyalty and retention is fundamental, at the same time as attracting new students, partners and learners.

Within each organisation, information is stored in a multitude of different ways depending on the school, department or faculty. Some staff will use Excel or Access or even Word documents, others will choose paper based or cardex solutions and others store all the information in their head. This type of piecemeal approach is adopted in organisations and institutions the world over, creating disjointed and ineffectual information streams and causing significant gaps in knowledge sharing across the relevant establishment. It is these gaps in information and knowledge which result in poor levels of customer service and ultimately student retention.

CRM solutions enable institutions to store their data centrally, either by department, faculty or school or indeed across the college, thus eliminating duplication of effort and providing staff with access to shared data. This in turn enables institutions to become more data centric and also provides staff with tools to run more targeted marketing campaigns improve forecasting and greatly enhance the customer experience - whether the customer is a student, prospect, partner organisation, training provider or parent.

SharePoint Solutions for the Education Sector

SharePoint is a very powerful and flexible platform used to build and manage intranets, extranets and external websites. It can be configured to provide your institution with document management, workflow and a range of automated tasks that can ease and improve your internal business flow and processes. It links to your back office solutions to bring reporting and their own distribution to a wider audience.

SharePoint is rapidly becoming the standard for collaboration, intranet and business portal solutions, and is one of the fastest adopted technologies across UK Post 16 education. SharePoint is a scalable information management platform that connects staff, students, and knowledge across business processes, helping them to work more effectively. The platform facilitates end-to-end collaboration by enabling information sharing and search capabilities across an institution. It also enables users to find relevant information quickly through customisation and personalisation of content and layout’.

SharePoint can provide:

• An effective, expandable intranet or extranet
• An external, content managed (CMS) external website or sites
• A document management and tracking system
• A process, collaboration and workflow system
• An integrated communications system
• A rapid and feature rich development environment

As your SharePoint trusted partner, our consultants manage the development, configuration, & customisation of your SharePoint solution to meet your specifications and requirements. We provide the SharePoint solution that is right for you.

For more information on our solutions for education establishments, please call us on 0845 094 2259.