At the heart of any planning and scheduling challenge is the need to ensure the right products or people are at the right place at the right time and in the right order while making maximum use of all available resources. This is the same whether in a busy vehicle logistics office, a complex production environment or the intense and ever changing environment of educational placement. Planners have to be agile enough to react quickly to unforeseen events and then attempt to update the entire plan accordingly. The consequences of poor or inadequate planning can often be extremely costly which is why planning and scheduling systems such as Orchestrate scheduling software from UK specialist Production Modelling are increasingly relied upon. This is precisely why the prestigious City University, London, has just been added to Production Modelling’s long list of companies successfully using Orchestrate and they are already seeing the benefits.
The challenges
Oonagh Gormley, Head of Academic Planning and Performance in the School of Health Sciences, outlines the main planning challenges that the University faces. “Our primary requirement is to match students to placements according to a complex set of rules while working with a variety of constraints.” Even a brief consideration of the scale of planning that this requires demonstrates the potential benefits that City University stands to gain. The School of Health Sciences has approximately 1500 students on Nursing and Midwifery programmes that have to fulfil between 50%-60% of their course time (depending on course) on active placement, which are offered by up to 200 placement providers of different types, sizes and distance from the university. Programmes can be of 2 or 3 years duration and each placement provider may offer varying numbers of placements for different elements of a programme at different times of year. Each placement is governed by strictly defined rules governing the nature and sequence of placements that each student has to adhere to.
Gormley illustrates the complex interdependency of these rules and why Orchestrate scheduling software has already proved to be so beneficial. “Some placements won’t take 1st year students, while others will but only to a certain percentage. Students may be eligible for certain placements only if they have taken the necessary preceding placements.” She continues, “We also have to deal with the reality that placement providers have a fixed capacity of space at any given time and that students can start their courses at different times.” The University’s placement plan also needs continual updating to take into account unforeseeable changes such as students not attending placements due to illness or placement providers unable to offer spaces due to unexpected maintenance work.
The limitations of spreadsheets
This is precisely the complex planning and scheduling scenario that Orchestrate was designed to help with. Unsurprisingly, the University had tried to address its challenges in the same way as many other institutions, i.e. by the use of complex and unwieldy spreadsheets. Unsurprisingly, these proved equally as incapable of adequately doing so. In City University’s case, they relied on a 9-10 page interlinked spreadsheet which when printed stretched the length of an entire wall. While not impossible to use to match students with placements, it was very time intensive and at best only provided a snapshot of which student was supposed to where and when. “The problem came,” explains Gormley, “when we had to update the plan to reflect any changes in either a student’s or a placement provider’s situation. This would all have to be done manually and could take hours whereas now with Orchestrate it’s a matter of pressing a button, Orchestrate has a quick think, and we have the right answer in minutes.”
The other area that the spreadsheet approach failed was its inability to provide students with a comprehensive placement history over their entire course, something they need for future employment or education possibilities. Orchestrate not only provides an up to date overview of a student’s entire placement history, past and projected, it also allows a user to drill down to each placement and see all the relevant information relating to this.
Why Orchestrate Scheduling Software
City University had already recognised the need to utilise a computerised scheduling solution and had even investigated a bespoke system developed by another University. This however was discounted on the grounds that it was not supported, would require considerable tweaking to fit their own requirements and would require skilled personnel to operate. What was required was a proven system that would be easy to configure to match their unique requirements and simple to use and maintain. A chance conversation between The School of Health Sciences’ Chief Operating Officer and a senior manager at Production Modelling led to the shared realisation that Orchestrate would meet all of these requirements. This was confirmed when Production Modelling demonstrated a working system modelled on City University’s workflow and a decision was made to invest in Orchestrate. As Gormley remarks, “It was clear that Orchestrate was the sort of solution we needed and so we made the pragmatic decision to try it.”
A culture of change
City University began using Orchestrate with live data at the start of the 2012 academic year with all and is retrospectively adding existing 2nd and 3rd year students so they too can benefit from the comprehensive placement history the system provides. According to Gormley, what unifies the many individual benefits that Orchestrate is already bringing is a positive change in culture at every level.
The university benefits
At a university placement planning level, the most immediate benefit from Orchestrate has been saving the equivalent of at least 1 full time position spent administering and maintaining the planning spreadsheet. As Gormley comments, “this has freed existing resource from basic admin work which means these people are now able to do much more value-added work.” The university is now able to react much quicker to any changes in either placement or student availability and with increased confidence. At a wider university level, Orchestrate is also being used as a central data repository for all information relating to placements. This is invaluable when it comes to the university’s bi-annual placement auditing process as Gormley explains, “Every two years we have to audit each placement provider which previously involved using another complex spreadsheet with lots of hyperlinks to other documents. Many of these were broken which made finding them very time consuming. Now all the relevant documents are stored in Orchestrate and immediately accessible.” Orchestrate also acts a central data store for all placement provider contracts with the university able to see an overview of placement provider performance at the touch of a button.
The students benefit
At a student level, because Orchestrate scheduling software is able to push live placement data to external online resources, they can now log in and immediately have access to their entire placement plan. On-going development work with Production Modelling will allow additional complementary information such as maps, travel information etc. to be displayed which will empower students to take more responsibility for managing their own placements. Gormley adds, “Thanks to Orchestrate, students will also find they have a slicker, more user friendly experience – the sort of thing that people increasingly expect to have.”
The placement providers benefit
Work is currently on-going which will extend Orchestrate’s benefits to the placement providers depending on various decisions yet to be taken by the university. For example, it is possible for the system to allow each placement provider to directly access and manage their own placement timetable. This will allow providers and students to liaise directly with each other and take more responsibility re placements and will significantly reduce the amount of time placement providers were previously having to spend when going via the university.
Building for the future
Gormley and the team at City University are understandably pleased with the benefits achieved so far but they recognise there is more to come from Orchestrate. Their main priority is harnessing the data already in the system by developing the system’s reporting capabilities. The final word belongs to Gormley. “So far we have already reaped a number of benefits and can see more to come. We are very pleased with the system and the progress we have made.”
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