Anyone who has worked in a South African admissions office knows the season. Applications pour in, documents need checking and staff work late to get through them.
PSET Chief Technology Officer Chris Wentworth says that is exactly the kind of problem the platform was built to solve. "With the pure volume of applicants each institution gets every year, there's not enough people to get through that quickly," he said. "You hear those stories of guys working late."
Two years from concept to launch
The platform unveiled at PURCON 2026 was the result of a two-year build. Wentworth says it started on paper long before any code was written.
"You conceptualise the idea, but then you've got to go and spec it out," he said. The team mapped workflows and designs, working out how every part of the system would fit together.
User interface specialists then studied modern design practice. "They spent a lot of time looking at good UX and UI practices, seeing what the modern stuff is, and putting all of that in," he said. Meanwhile, engineers designed the database and how information would flow through it. Only then did development begin, followed by testing "to make sure it does what it's supposed to do".
From paper to truly digital
Wentworth says the sector's traditional model has always been paper. Many institutions have since moved some processes online, but he questions how far that has gone.
"Have they gone truly mobile? Have they gone fully fledged mobile? Have they got AI integration behind it, validating all that data that they get?"
AI that sorts, staff who decide
PSET describes itself as "AI first by design". In admissions, that means the system does the first round of checking.
"The system's going to do it without taking the control away from people," Wentworth said. "It's going to analyse it and say: here are all the ones that are correct, here are all the ones you need to look at, rather than going through page by page."
The aim is not to replace admissions staff, but to direct their time to the cases that need human judgment. And because PSET's Student Lifecycle module follows a student from application through to graduation and alumni engagement, information captured at the start does not need to be re-entered later.
For institutions with tight budgets, that kind of automation is not a luxury. "Limited funding means that we need to automate what we can't do," said Sydney Maqoqa of Nelson Mandela University. "We need technology to bridge the gap between what we cannot do, and have it covered by technology."
No such thing as plug and play
For most institutions, the first question about a new ERP is how it fits with what they already have. Wentworth is candid.
"I don't think there'll ever be a simple plug and play," he said. "But we built it with an API layer model, with interoperability in mind. Is integration possible? Absolutely. Is there going to be effort required? Yeah, there's going to be some."
That means institutions can adopt PSET in stages. "We know that some institutions want to keep certain key modules that they don't want to replace, and they only want certain ones," he said. "We'll certainly look at that."
For institutions, connection is the point. Thembi Tabatha, Director of Procurement at Vaal University of Technology, says sector systems "are still working in silos".
"There needs to be integration in the systems," she said.
Built for their environment
Wentworth says the response after the launch was encouraging. "The guys are excited there's another entrant into the market, and that it's customised to their environments, built for their environment," he said.
The next step is full demonstrations. For admissions teams, the promise is more immediate: fewer late nights.
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