Prime College, a Nigerian educational institution with over 700 students, has been using SAFSIMS for the past seven years. Mahmud-Najim Lanre Mahmud, the school administrator, talked about how SAFSIMS has improved their processes. He highlighted big improvements in result processing, reduced use of paper, eased workloads for their educators, gave them a better grasp on their finances and how they communicate with parents.
Key Findings
- SAFSIMS has automated result computation, cutting processing time from over a week to just 2-3 days.
- Its bulk messaging feature now handles all circulars and notifications, replacing paper-based communication.
- The school has significantly reduced paper use and manual work in result processing and admission-related tasks.
The Challenges
For the past 22 years of its existence, Prime College used printed circulars to share information with parents. This meant typing, printing, and making tons of copies for every student. It took time, cost a lot, and wasn’t practical because of the student size. Plus, these papers in the hands of students could easily get lost or never make it home.
Mahmud-Najim Lanre Mahmud, the school’s administrator, describes the old process thus:
“Before now, the secretary or the typist needs to type the circular and have it signed by the principal of the school. After signing of the circular by the principal, you now have to make photocopies and share them to the students. For example, you have like 300 students, you have to buy paper to distribute the circular to all 300 students.”
“There is also the tendency that some of these students will misplace their circulars or leave it behind at school. Some will take it home and forget to give it to their parents. After all is said and done; from costs to man hours put into thise end of the day, the information will not get to the parents.”
The Solution: SAFSIMS Improved Their Communication Process
Mahmud-Najim Lanre Mahmud, the school’s administrator, recalled when SAFSIMS was first introduced to the school.
“SAFSIMS was introduced to our school seven years back. We put it on trial, and we discovered that it makes our work very easy and reduces the workload.”
He further explained that the school first used SAFSIMS to handle result processing, their most time-consuming task, taking up to 60 – 100 hours per educator per term especially considering they also release mid-term results. With SAFSIMS, that time was reduced to a few hours. After seeing its success in computing results, Prime College expanded its use of SAFSIMS to improve parent communication. This shift and taking their results digital was a major move toward cutting down overhead costs and their paper use as an institution.
Results of Implementation
SAFSIMS helped the school increase efficiency by switching from paper circulars thus saving over $1,000 and 60 man hours to bulk messaging via the SAFSIMS platform. Prime College uses this feature for important announcements, reminders, and updates. A big advantage is that the system confirms when parents have received said messages.
This change has saved the school money on paper, printing, and photocopying. Plus, they are now confident that parents receive the messages as intended.
Also, teachers now enter student scores directly into the platform simultaneously unlike the previous method where the report collation process involved collating results from teacher to teacher. It was a very tedious and error-prone process with lots of paperwork. With the dashboards and automation on SAFSIMS, the platform automatically calculates totals, averages, rankings, and generates detailed reports. This has removed the need for manual calculations and physical report cards. As a result, the school has drastically reduced its costs and carbon footprint via a lower use of paper, while improving its processes.
