UNIT4
Helping Educational Organizations Manage Change and Improve Stakeholder Engagement

Educational organizations are characterized by the need to address unique changes in short time frames. Events such as competitive pressures to recruit new students; maintain regulatory changes in school governance and reporting hierarchies; and change of course delivery models among others should be accommodated in the shortest time possible. For more than three decades UNIT4, headquartered in the Netherlands, has been offering solutions to support the institutions to respond to rapid, ongoing changes in structure and business direction to improve engagement and experience of both the student and academic community.

Developed in partnership with the education sector, UNIT4’s Campus is a fully-integrated higher education and research software suite designed to manage the day-to-day activities of administrators, faculty, and students. From attracting desirable students and supporting them throughout their education to award research grants and maintain alumni relationships—Campus offers a new approach to higher education and research management to enable all stakeholders to be more creative and innovative in how they fulfill their mandates. “Our solutions are tailored for the unique needs of education and research institutions and their stakeholders, designed to enable sound and timely decision-making,” says José Duarte, CEO, UNIT4.

Campus comes integrated with Finance Management, a financial management solution to help reduce costs and improve efficiency; Research Management, a solution that streamlines research processes, including costing and pricing, billing, administration, funding and proposals; Human Capital Management (HR), a dedicated solution to manage all aspects of the hire-to-retire cycle to help get the best from an organization’s most important asset—its staff;

Our solutions are tailored for the unique needs of education and research institutions and their stakeholders, designed to enable sound and timely decision-making

Student Management, developed to administer, track, and monitor all aspects of students and program management; Reporting and Analysis, created to quickly, easily, and inexpensively analyze and report on an unlimited number of business scenarios; and Business and Student Engagement, made to improve the engagement and experience of both the student and academic community.These integrated tools aredesigned for the day-to-day activities of administrators, faculty and students.
Campus is built on the UNIT4 Agresso platform which provides real “post-implementation agility,” allowing systems to be reconfigured easily without depending on expensive external consultants or programmers to reflect changing requirements, even months or years after installation. “In addition, it offers student and people-focused functionality with more sector-specific capabilities than other ERP providers,” says Duarte. “With its agile architecture, available through a choice of deployment options, we provide an information management system that is built to last,” he remarks.

UNIT4 develops software for service-based customers across a variety of sectors that need to manage ongoing change. Its clients include colleges, universities, research institutions, not-for-profit associations, foundations, and governments who seek software that supports their business as well as empowering the imagination and innovation of their own people. One of UNIT4’s clients, the UK-based Cranfield University, like all academic institutions worldwide, was experiencing massive change from multiple directions: rising student tuition fees, escalating external funding requirements, new hardware and software-related technology needs, management/process re-organizations, and more. The University’s ERP system was aging and getting expensive to run, compromising the ability to meet its financial and user requirements. After a rigorous review and selection process, Cranfield began its enterprise solution partnership with UNIT4. Campus helped the institution to redeploy its various IT staff members to more productive work, helping save the client almost $1 million, with ongoing annual savings of approximately $137,000.

As well as Cranfield University, UNIT4’s Campus is benefiting more than 400 institutions in the world including University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Södertörn University, Monash University, and Royal Roads University. “We continue to work in close partnership with education and research institutions, throughout the product development lifecycle, to understand their exact pains and requirements,” concludes Duarte.