Outsourcing Bookstore Satisfies Triangle Tech Students and Administrators
ED MAP solutions give Triangle Tech the confidence to outsource textbook fulfillment
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With an on-time graduation rate of 91 percent, Triangle Tech, a Pennsylvania career school with six locations offering 16-month associate’s degrees (AST) in six career programs, must be doing something right. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average graduation rate for full-time, first-time students in a two year degree program is 58 percent. If you ask CEO Tim McMahon what the “something right” is, he’ll tell you it’s providing the intensive support needed to navigate students around obstacles that short-circuit graduation.
“Triangle Tech takes an aggressive, proactive approach to ensuring that services are available and delivered to students,” McMahon says. He believes students can focus better on learning if they receive strong support with issues such as financial aid, career guidance and having course textbooks and supplies readily available. “Our enrollees may not graduate if they don’t receive these support services,” he says. “We’ve found our students often don’t know what they need to succeed in school. They also may not be persistent in finding out what they need and in doing what’s necessary to get it. So our philosophy is to be aggressive hand-holders.”
The Benefits and Costs of Aggressive Handholding
An important part of that hand-holding for Triangle Tech is providing students with course textbooks and supplies, charging a mandatory course-materials fee that becomes part of the financial aid package. The system removes the student burden of shopping for and purchasing course supplies—or worse, not doing so at all. Triangle Tech’s approach is a big plus, judging from recent figures like those from the University of California Riverside showing that only three in 10 students surveyed are purchasing their courses’ required textbooks.
But while the institution-provided model solved one problem, it created a host of others. According to McMahon, the staff worked from a program-by-program booklist. They had to deal with individual course-material vendors; order materials each quarter based on the number of students for that term; stockpile delivered books; and finally, put together each student’s course-materials package to match his or her program and term.
“Every step had the potential for things to go wrong,” McMahon says. “We had to pull primary staff off their regular jobs. It was costly and stressful, and we still didn’t provide the level of service students needed. Books might arrive on time—or not. There might be an error in quantity; we might have over-ordered, or under-ordered, having to re-supply on the fly,” he says. When students didn’t get course materials on time, it caused problems in more ways than one: “When a student has to start a term without books, for a school administrator, that’s the gift that keeps on giving,” he says. “We would still be hearing the student’s dissatisfaction about it long after the fact.”
McMahon knew something had to change. “We needed to find a better, and less painful, acquisition and delivery system that had a clean, simple approach to getting books and supplies that students needed on-time and complete each quarter,” he says.
Improved Processes – Plus Reports
Triangle Tech held extensive discussions with ED MAP to describe its needs, challenges and preferences, and the company in turn designed a fulfillment system tailor-made for Triangle Tech. Now ED MAP bulk ships textbooks and other course materials every quarter to the school’s six campuses. They are prepackaged for each individual student according to his or her program and term. Triangle Tech staff simply have to put the packages in students’ hands on orientation day.
To save costs, Triangle Tech pulls information from its admissions system to create a spreadsheet-style order file for ED MAP. The company enters the order into its electronic fulfillment system and compiles the packages, filled with new, printed textbooks and program-appropriate supplies. The order is shipped well in advance of the start of each term. ED MAP goes a step farther by issuing a report to Triangle Tech on sales by campus. Additional ED MAP reports allow the school to match book shipments to individual student ledgers and to calculate textbook costs by program.
McMahon indicated recently that the school may be interested in a systems interface with ED MAP that would make its work even easier, ensuring it almost one-click ordering via computer. In the meantime, though, Triangle Tech’s staff is just enjoying the reprieve from the school’s in-house-fulfillment days. “We consider our work with ED MAP to be a successful result based on what we set out to do,” he says, “And I’m really happy to be out of the bookstore business.”