The need for independent student accommodation in South Africa is booming. This brings along many new companies providing student accommodation all over the country. But managing this business is impossible without applicable resources and a reliable IT system to keep track of the accommodation and its tenants.
Xpedia became involved in this industry when it first took hands with South Point. South Point offers students accommodation in secure, well-positioned buildings in the heart of university communities, nationally.
In 2010 South Point was in the midst of implementation Oracle E-Business Suite as its new ERP system and one of South Point's greatest challenges was the process to register new students and book rooms, which had to be done in great volumes every year as new students registered in their thousands. Doing this directly in the ERP system was simply too cumbersome. Xpedia developed an online booking system for South Point to streamline this process. This system allows bookings to be handled online through an easy-to-use interface that students can understand and bookings automatically interface to the backend Oracle system to create new customer and lease records when necessary.
Xpedia has also completed an integration project for another major student accommodation provider, who is a leading developer and manager of student accommodation in South Africa. This company required integration between its booking system and its financial system, Pastel. Xpedia developed an integration layer between the booking and financial systems to ensure that data is synchronised accurately and, importantly, that billing takes place correctly.
Another imperative requirement at South Point was for an exceptional communication system between South Point and the students. Communicating with thousands of students in various buildings in different geographical areas presents many challenges. Even though most of the students have cellphones, they tend to change their numbers regularly. Students may also change their rooms during the course of the academic year, and thus, for South Point, a communication tool that was adaptable was an important criterion when seeking an SMS-type communication solution.
TextConnect by Xpedia solved these problems. TextConnect is an online SMS communication tool that allows the user to send SMS messages and get feedback. This is ideal for surveys, event co-ordinators, schools, unions, sport clubs, churches, marketing and human resources departments, customer satisfaction feedback, or anyone who easily wants to contact a large group of people.
In South Point's case, the online booking system was developed with a one time pin verification during the annual take-on process to confirm every student's cellphone number, ensuring that at least once a year the contact details for all students are up to date. TextConnect has also been set up to synchronise daily with South Point's Oracle EBS financial system and relevant contact information is transferred from its customer records. Cellphone numbers and contact groups are updated and students and groups are added and removed as necessary. This means the information in TextConnect is always up to date.
What makes TextConnect so perfect for this industry is its flexibility to the company's specific system needs. TextConnect is easy to use and can be integrated with any ERP solution. The product can be customised to meet each business' specific SMS communication needs.
Custom fields for contacts is another great TextConnect feature. These fields can be used as links to various systems like Oracle EBS, Pastel, or to store extra information like the outstanding amount on a person's account. Custom contact fields can be updated through the sync feature to make sure the content is always correct.
TextConnect's standard reply processing functionality makes it possible to categorise responses to your message according to rules. This makes it easy to send out surveys and process replies. Replies can be categorised and additional actions can be taken on certain categories, such as automatically replying to a message if someone answers "Yes".
In South Point's case, the group management in TextConnect enables the management of SMS sending to the student body in a variety of ways. The sync process dynamically creates groups as may be necessary. There are designated groups for Buildings, Floors, and Precinct. The system works well if you need to send a specific message to a group of students that reside in a specific building, eg: "The water mains in building X is off and is being repaired." The power of automatic groups lies in the fact that the groups are always up to date without any user intervention, and categorises the thousands of contacts into manageable chunks. Users can also create groups manually to facilitate processes like communicating to a society like the chess club to arrange a tournament.
Anjoh Poolton, South Point's National Facilities Executive, states: "In my view, the tool has been invaluable to make and maintain contact with our student body on a national level on various subject matters. The use of this tool makes communication easier to a body of people that would otherwise be very difficult to communicate with, due to the immense volume that we accommodate. On a national level, we have almost 10 000 students living with us."
For further information on TextConnect and other Xpedia products and services, please contact Xpedia on info@xpedia.co.za or on (+27) 12 667 2970 or visit its Web site on www.xpedia.co.za.
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