Rush Revamps Administrative Systems with ERP, Portal

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/07/08

Rush University has chosen Datatel Colleague and ActiveApply software to build an administrative system and enhance student recruitment efforts. The applications will replace a legacy administration system.

Located in Chicago, the 1,600-student campus includes Rush Medical College, the College of Nursing, the College of Health Sciences, and the Graduate College.

The decision to contract with Datatel was made after a nine-month evaluation by a committee of IT employees and university users. The evaluation team did site visits to current Datatel clients, including other academic medical centers using Colleague.

"Our committee chose Datatel because of its great reputation for after-sale support and Colleague's out-of-the-box functionality. Not requiring customization frees up our IT people from writing code, plus Colleague's interface to Business Objects' Crystal Reports will provide us rich, robust reporting functionality," said Paul Jones, associate provost of student services. "Datatel has also had much experience with medical universities, which we found compelling."

Rush will deploy the Colleague enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to support areas including financial aid, academic records, registration, and student services. A consolidated and user-customizable interface to those areas will be provided by the Datatel's ActiveCampus Portal, built on Microsoft SharePoint technology.

ActiveApply will allow potential students to apply online to the university. The application integrates with Colleague to enable document and data workflow between recruitment offices campus-wide.