Case Studies

Staff number: 250 Students: 4,000 Special Features: Edu-Reg web based suite

Assisting the College to ensure high attendance levels and operate a full payment system

Merthyr Tydfil College is a further education college in Wales, with 4,000 students and 250 staff members. The college has three different sites, the main building, the Workshop building and the Old Town Hall Building where lectures are taking place.

The college provides a range of courses to students from the local area, including GCSEs, A Levels, BTECs, Apprenticeships and Access courses. Merthyr Tydfil College also offers a limited provision of higher education courses in conjunction with the University of South Wales.

The College is recognised across the region as a centre of excellence for all learners from 16 onwards.  The college provides first class education and training both on campus and in the workplace.

The Challenge

The need to effectively record time and attendance in Merthyr Tydfil College was one of the first challenges Synel had to deal with. A specialised automated system like Edureg could help the College gain significant funding and score high attendance levels at a national level.

The new building of Merthyr Tydfil has paved the way, the college to be recognised as a hub for community learning and activities.  Since it’s built, it has made a significant and distinctive contribution to the local community, initiating a range of partnerships to drive forward skills development and community regeneration and open up for community use. Due to the fact that the college is open for community use there was an increasing need apart from the student registration to install a full payment system for café, refectory, library and College professional services.

The second major challenge of this project was that the installation of Synel Systems had to be aligned with the Construction work that was taking place at the new building. A high level of project management and customer engagement was required.

Why Merthyr Tydfil chose Synel UK

Merthyr Tydfil chose Synel among several companies through a Tenders application process.

Synel’s Edureg System proved to be the ideal system for Merthyr Tydfil College as it provided modular solutions like Student Registration, Cashless System and Access Control all-in-one solution. Moreover the 25 years of experience in the installation and provision of these systems played a significant role at the selection of Synel.

Synel’s approach and solution

Benefits

Automated Student Registration was made easy and helped the College to:

• Save precious teaching time
• Reduce administration Costs
• Ensure no manual registration needed
• Encourage students to take responsibility
• Provide seamless write back to existing MIS
• Security

Edureg system supported cashless & cash payments with the use of the student card. A student at Merthyr Tydfil can use their card to load balance themselves. They can use their Student card in the café or the refectory of the College, at the vending machines and at the Library shop where they can buy stationery and pay for copy or print. Edureg is fully integrated with the copy-control system.

The Edureg system fully supports now a series of state of the art hardware installations that simplify the everyday life of students and visitors such as, 8 electronic sales point tills, 3 card integrated vending machines, 3 standalone cash loaders and 120 Synergy attendance terminals

The results

The Synel team had to overcome important challenges like a very tight timeline, the construction process of the new building and the building preservation of the third site of the College. Specifically, at the third building, the old Town Hall, the fingerprint recognition devices could not be mounted on the walls of the building due to its historical preservation background. Synel team provided the College with a solution and desk mounted the clocking machines.

Merthyr Tydfil College is now enjoying the following benefits of Edureg in terms of Electronic Registration and Full Payments solution that supports Cashless & Cash. According to the Head of Student Records, Chris Richards, ‘Merthyr Tydfil College benefited from the installation of Edureg system in many ways. The College saved time without the need for manual registration, encouraged students to take responsibility and provided an accurate account of students. Edureg helps fight truancy while providing accurate information.’