Helping this Scheduler Sleep Better at Night
October 01, 2018
Helping this Scheduler Sleep Better at Night
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with EMS Software
EMS is being used in our Registrar’s Office for academic scheduling and in our Hospitality Services Office for event scheduling. We are looking to branch out to Student Life, too, so they can help manage student club event requests. This program address issues with space reservation and utilization.
- Academic scheduling in a shared system. I’ve struggled for years with our old system. Whenever I’d import academic events, unfailingly, some of them would be bounced out because Hospitality booked events in academic spaces even though they weren’t supposed to. Try as I might to educate on this, there would always be at least a few conflicts and they were hard to find, which opened the door for double booking issues. With EMS, when I load in academic events, any Hospitality events get bounced out - not the other way around! It’s a Godsend.
- Flexibility around web user access. In our old system, it was quite the burden to create and maintain varying levels of access and security for spaces and types of events that people on campus could request. With the process template system, we find it very easy to limit or grant varying levels of access to different people and maintain that access as the university process evolves.
- Creating and maintaining contacts and their associated departments (or “groups” as they are called in EMS). While it was a little onerous to get the HR Toolkit element installed for EMS, now that it’s working, the function is serves is invaluable. I absolutely LOVE how it associates people/everyday users with their home departments, then grants them template access based on that. It’s so slick and so easy.
- Two words. Tech support. I don’t know if we on-boarded at a bad time or what, but the tech support that we’ve received has been abysmal. We’ve opened tickets and not had them answered for a whole week - 5 whole business days! When we finally did get a response, it was hardly apologetic. What’s worse, my IT guy would be contacted by someone, he would ask them to give him 5 minutes to get his conference phone set up, and then he’d wait and wait and wait for the tech support rep to get back to him and he’d never show! This happened 6 times. 6 times. Not ok. Our timeline for going live has been negatively affected by this lack of service.
- Training. Our trainer was OK, but I find that he had a hard time articulating new concepts and making them make sense. I had to figure it out myself, then I could see what he was saying. I’m sure in his own head it made sense, because he had the context for his explanation. But for me coming into a new system, I had no context. I needed him to back up and explain things from a more foundational level first, then build on that.
- Along with tech support and training, I would say we’ve lacked a general level of company care. Where is the rep calling to see how our implementation process is coming along? Where are the people offering to help us if we have any issues? We seem to be reaching out to a lot of folks and not getting any care in return.
- We haven’t really looked at that yet, but I’m sure it will help streamline student event scheduling.
- Increase efficient space utilization.
- Give us a powerful set of reports to provide evidence of space usage (good or bad) to the Powers-That-Be on campus.
Series25 Scheduling Suite - so far, EMS seems to be a far superior scheduling program. It has features I’ve only wished and dreamed of (like bumping events from academic space and automating finals exam scheduling). We’ve hit some bumps, too, but that’s expected. Generally, I would recommend EMS over R25 any day.