WA apprenticeship administrator places Microsoft CRM

The college, which is said to be the first educational institution to bring the apprenticeship program to Western Australia, bought 10 licenses via CRM systems integrator, Aaromba, earlier this year.

The system replaces spreadsheets and manual processes that recorded placement opportunities, employers, students and performance for reporting internally, to participating employers and the government.

The placement process involves sending up to four letters to the prospective student. Each document contains a range of information on both the employer and student.

Until the new CRM system came in, all this information was input into each letter by hand.

The College admits up to 150 Year 11 and 12 apprentices each year, according to Marissa Crouch, training & employment administrator at ATC's South Perth branch.

“I can now pull up a letter and the system auto-fills the details,” said Crouch.

“For example it auto-generates all the employer, student and college details into a form that has to be signed at the same time as the apprenticeship contract.

“Before we were manually inputting all the details in every time,” said Crouch.

She continued: “If I had to find an employer’s details I had to go through the business card folder.

“[In the CRM system] all employer details are there and up-to-date so whoever is looking at them has the correct information,” said Crouch.

The system has also helped ATC manage lead generation from the time a prospective student is contacted to – best case scenario – when they accept an apprenticeship, and then how they perform on the program, said Crouch.

ATC’s training and employment coordinator, Victor John, said ATC had evaluated several options, including salesforce.com and Act!, which is made by Sage.

“We chose Microsoft because of the Office reporting structure,” said John.

Microsoft Australia’s lead product manager for Dynamics, Ross Dembecki, told iTnews that ATC’s experience was indicative of the way Microsoft CRM could be deployed.

“You wouldn’t say ATC is a direct out-of-the-box candidate for a sales management tool but they see it as a relationship management tool for their employers and students,” said Dembecki.

“They worked with a partner to configure the product to their needs.”

Dembecki said Microsoft would be releasing a series of extension modules for version 4.0 of the product, both now and into the New Year.

Microsoft has launched a free events module to help with physical event management. It also plans to release an analytics accelerator consisting of pre-built dashboards, and a mobile client via partner, Ten Digits.

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