Universidad Católica del Maule optimizes its enrollment process in high demand schedules

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The course registration process is a challenge for universities and can be very stressful both for students and for the IT services areas in charge of ensuring that the systems work well. At the Universidad Católica del Maule, also known as UCM, they are very satisfied in this regard, because with the support of Novis, in their recent process of taking classes they successfully attended to their students, at a rate of 1,700 every 30 minutes, through the student portal, designed in SAP Fiori, which is integrated with the SAP solutions of this house of studies.

Universidad Católica del Maule is one of the six traditional Catholic universities in Chile. Its main campus is in Talca, with eight faculties and a general education department, distributed in three campuses.

UCM implemented SAP S/4 HANA in 2019, selecting Novis as its partner, who provides the SAP IT service, which consists of providing the infrastructure for SAP solutions in the Novis cloud, operational support, and administration.

We spoke with Moisés Ahumada, head of applications at UCM, responsible for continuous functional improvement, support and projects, and Juan Manuel Espinoza, head of IT infrastructure at UCM and who oversees the administration of SAP solutions, which are managed by Novis. Both described to us how they are coping successfully with the course registration process:

“We currently have more than eleven thousand regular students, who take classes the same week, according to a calendar for each faculty, which gives us an average of about 3,500 per day. The students are anxious; they want to be attended to quickly to choose their courses, professors, and to match schedules, in short. When the daily process opens at 9:00 a.m. we have an average of 1,700 students waiting, which we can serve in less than 30 minutes.

The first time it didn’t work out very well, we were not able to attend them during peak hours, so based on the results of that process we worked with Novis adjusting and enhancing the infrastructure in their private cloud (on premise). In the second year we improved a lot and in this third year we achieved a flawless process.

Our strategy has been to set up more application servers during periods of high demand and implement the use of a virtual waiting room to regulate the flow of attention, while we monitor with the tools provided by Novis both the response time for students and the use of the servers.

We are attentive both functionally and operationally, so that the process is orderly, and our students have good experience.

Being in the Novis cloud has given us the flexibility to increase the number of servers only at peak times, which are the enrollment and grade-taking periods, paying according to usage. Normally we have five application servers, and for the process of taking classes we increase to eight. The virtual room also has a cost, which we do not pay every month, but only when we use it.

Sometimes the calendar for taking grades coincides with the financial closing of the month, which is also done in SAP, so that in addition to the students, we must attend to the users of the budget and finance units.

During the process of taking grades, we set up a call center with a unique number to assist students. Another indicator we look at are the comments on social networks, and so we know that our users this year are satisfied with the results of the process. So we have the peace of mind that we have fulfilled our mission well.”

Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis newsletter editor.

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