Press Releases

Morehouse School of Medicine Selects SunGard’s Banner Digital Campus, Offsite Hosting and Rapid Implementation Services to Help Improve Student Service and Operational Efficiency

September 9, 2010 — Malvern, PA

Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) is implementing SunGard Higher Education’s Banner Digital Campus to help provide student services that mirror the quality of the institution’s medical program and help the school retain its competitive edge. MSM also contracted with SunGard Higher Education for offsite hosting and application management to help keep its new infrastructure current without stressing its limited IT staff and budget.

Many processes at the institution have traditionally been manual and paper-based. According to Sterling Roaf, Jr., M.D., director of admissions, today, with more than 4,000 annual applicants applying to MSM, staff must manually process the information. Additional manual processes are executed for awarding financial aid. Similar time-consuming, manual processes are repeated in other departments throughout the campus.

“Our primary goal for the implementation of our Banner Digital Campus is to create a more efficient environment where information is integrated, and where faculty, students, staff and administrators have access to personalized information and services online,” said Donnetta Butler, chief financial officer and senior vice president for administration at Morehouse School of Medicine. “We are recruiting faculty, staff and students who are very proficient in technology and we need to provide a similar experience in order to remain competitive. It is equally important that our administrative processes reflect the high caliber of our academic and research programs. To accomplish this, we needed to make an investment in the right technology.”

In order to avoid managing duplicate financial systems, Morehouse School of Medicine contracted with SunGard Higher Education for a Win services implementation beginning in January 2010, helping it go live with Banner Finance in July 2010 for the start of the new fiscal year. SunGard Higher Education helped deliver an accelerated, standardized implementation schedule by supporting module-based Banner applications that have been mostly pre-configured using proven best practices gained from years of experience. Prior to implementing Banner, MSM staff had to work with six different data applications just to complete financial reporting. SunGard consultants were familiar with MSM’s existing data applications because of the company’s experience in managing non-SunGard products at other institutions. This familiarity, along with committed staff throughout the institution, helped in achieving the rapid six-month implementation. The full Banner Digital Campus will help the institution achieve the following objectives:

  • Provide accurate and timely reports to management, faculty and administrative staff
  • Support growing research activity
  • Provide on-demand, single sign-on access to information and resources to students, staff and faculty
  • Eliminate time and resources required of IT staff to provide support and maintain interfaces for multiple enterprise applications.

After a thorough analysis, Morehouse School of Medicine also chose to have SunGard host and maintain its Banner Digital Campus offsite in order to keep the Banner system current without expending IT resources. The tailored package of offsite hosting, Win services and the Banner Digital Campus is an example of how SunGard Higher Education’s Open Digital Campus vision and technology strategy helps institutions shape technology to meet their evolving needs.

“By listening to the needs and drivers of Morehouse School of Medicine, we were able to bring together software, services and solutions to go live to meet its fiscal deadline, and build a quality student services platform that will help it retain its competitive edge in the long term,” said Bruce Bleiman, senior vice president, customer relationships, SunGard Higher Education.

About Morehouse School of Medicine
Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) recruits and trains minority and other students as physicians, biomedical scientists and public health professionals committed to improving the health and well-being of communities. MSM is a member of the largest consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the world — the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC). For more information about Morehouse School of Medicine, visit us online at www.msm.edu.

About SunGard Higher Education
SunGard Higher Education serves colleges, universities and foundations in 40 countries worldwide. Through its Open Digital Campus strategy, SunGard collaborates with the higher education community and provides software and services to help institutions find better ways to teach, learn, manage and connect. To learn more, please visit www.sungardhe.com.

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves 25,000 customers in 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 380 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. For more information, please visit www.sungard.com.

Trademark information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, Banner and Open Digital Campus are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.