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Technology & Campus Services: The Changing Face of Auxiliary Services
9/30/2006
As new needs crop up on campus, Auxiliary Services finds solutions for mobile transactions, mountains of junk mail, even green construction.
THE SEQUOIA: Retail Systems
Wireless
CampusCard Reader
allows transactions on the go.
Can auxiliary services be mission-critical? You bet they can. With tuition on the rise, Auxiliary Services departments at a variety of colleges and universities are proving that they can innovate and still save their parent institutions cash. First in auxiliary services innovation: With advancements in technology, a handful of institutions are moving campus purchasing programs into the wireless space. Second: With the proliferation of junk mail, learning centers are finding new ways to eliminate paper waste and improve efficiency across the board. Finally: As environmental conservation becomes a bigger concern, schools are embracing buildings that don’t harm the Earth, and many of the services involved in those efforts make use of “green” approaches and innovative technologies. Put simply, auxiliary services aren’t so auxiliary anymore.
“Every dollar a school can save in terms of auxiliary services means one less dollar in raised tuition,” says Bob Hassmiller, executive director of the National Association of College Auxiliary Services, an industry organization based in Charlottesville, VA. “Meeting the demands to give better service and charge more reasonable rates for those services is what continues to put [auxiliary services] in the forefront.”
Facilitating Mobility
Nobody understands these sentiments better than officials at Duke University (NC), where officials sought to enable students to use the DukeCard to complete transactions via the Blackboard Transaction System at off-site locations such as athletic events. For years, Duke’s campus card officials accomplished this feat by stretching wires from the nearest Ethernet port or by handling transactions with paper receipts and reconciling them later. Finally, in 2003, the team had had enough of this setup, and set out to explore opportunities to utilize the school’s pervasive wireless network to its advantage.
The quest for new technology began when DukeCard programmers developed a browser-based application that worked on a number of mobile devices around campus. The team presented the concept at the annual Blackboard User’s Conference in Baltimore, where it was received with interest. Because the DukeCard office wasn’t in a position to develop the product, Blackboard partner Sequoia Retail Systems stepped in and integrated the browser with the Sequoia Wireless Campus Card Reader. Matthew Drummond, director of the DukeCard office, says this device changed the school’s entire approach virtually overnight.
“As the success of the wireless transaction has grown, more and more demand has been put on us to provide these services anytime, anywhere around campus,” he says. Noting that the latest card readers are no larger than a standard personal digital assistant (PDA), he adds, “This technology enables us to do just that.”
Today, the devices, nearly 20 in all, enable DukeCard officials to access user activity and account privileges, process debit and credit transactions, make deposits, give refunds, and check balances— all in real time over the wireless network. The devices also can store offline transactions, validate them against a snapshot of the cardholder database, and post them when it reconnects to the network. Drummond says that since the system was rolled out in late 2004, the devices have cataloged more than 52,000 transactions totaling more than $350,000. Last year, on a single Saturday with a number of events, the DukeCard office ran 12 different devices in six different locations at the same time.
Drummond adds that his team also uses the tools in more than 20,500 validation transactions where proof of enrollment is required. Case in point: the annual iPod distribution. Every year, the school doles out iPods to all incoming freshmen. By using the wireless campus card readers to scan student IDs, the DukeCard office is able to ensure they are giving devices only to eligible students. This distribution procedure also has been used for events where attendees had to meet specific requirements such as yearbook distribution, First Year picnic, and Senior Night. According to Drummond, the technology has made organizing these outings easy.
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