The university went live with TechnologyOne’s Student Management SaaS solution in December 2016, providing users with a secure, integrated experience and data that is accessible anywhere, any time and on any device.

The solution has enabled La Trobe University to save on hardware and utility costs, freed up staff time by reducing manual processes, and provided students with an improved learning experience.

“From our staff to our students, the shift to TechnologyOne SaaS has given everyone at La Trobe University a richer experience and we now have the opportunity to innovate” Hildyard said.

“Students now have access to a one-stop learning spot for all things student administrative, from any mobile device. It means they’re now enjoying the digital experience they expect from one of Australia’s leading universities, and can focus their time on the parts of university life they enjoy most, and not the admin.”

Hildyard added: “We moved to SaaS to gain access to a more robust and secure platform, minimise outages and maintenance that come with an on-premise solution, and deliver a cloud-first, mobile-first experience to our students.”

“By partnering with TechnologyOne, we were able to leapfrog the industry and become the first university in Australia to move our student management software to the cloud. We did something bold, and we’ve since seen other universities follow suit very quickly.”

La Trobe University hadn’t invested in its core systems for 10 years, and was looking to radically transform its business to be not only current, but ‘top of the class’ in the higher education sector.

In partnership with TechnologyOne, La Trobe University rolled out a Program to remove outdated systems, consolidate student management operations, and move from an on-premise environment to SaaS.

“We embarked on an overarching journey right across the board to move to a different operating model, one where the supplier provided SaaS, where you don’t have to worry about software updates,” Hildyard said.

“The reality was we would actually have a product within 18 months, that would normally have taken us years to deploy in the way that we were previously maintaining the product.

“We wanted to eliminate paper-based processes and replace them with a digital experience. We wanted the application-to-enrolment process to be very easy, so students could enter information really simply into our system. For example, if a student had previously done a course, we wanted to easily pull that and attach it to their application, making that assessment very streamlined.”