Royal Northern College of Music latest Conservatoire to go live on Agresso software

Agresso UK, today announced that the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) has gone live on its Agresso Students software in just six months, when an average Higher Education installation can typically take up to 18 months.

Formed in 1973 from the merger of the Royal Manchester College of Music with the Northern School of Music, the RNCM has, for many years, been the first choice institution for a large number of aspiring professional musicians from the UK and overseas.

The RNCM required a system that would help it improve its student management processes from curriculum definition to admissions and attendance marking. Agresso Students is a modern system providing simple, but feature rich support and information for senior managers, MIS practitioners, tutors and students. With all data held in a single integrated database, regardless of where data is entered, all parts of the system are updated simultaneously.

“We have been impressed by the knowledge and organisation of the Agresso project team,” said Dave Long, Head of IT at the RNCM. “We have achieved our goals at each stage of the implementation with their help and importantly, hit a vital deadline which has meant we could successfully post our end of year Higher Education Standards Authority (HESA) return, which is critical for a student-centric organisation like ours. We only have 700 students in total, and very limited resources, but we are tasked with meeting the same statutory requirements as other larger institutions. We are confident we have chosen the right solution to make student management more efficient and to help us add value to the organisation as well as easing the administrative burden on our in-house teams. Phase two of the project is to install Agresso CRM.”

There are only seven Conservatoires in the UK, and five of them use Agresso’s software. This is because it offers the breadth of functionality to cater for the full scope of the modern student centric organisation within an integrated database environment. Agresso plans to create a specific user group for its music colleges where they will be able to share experiences and get involved in the product development lifecycle.

About Unit 4 Agresso
Unit 4 Agresso is a leading international producer of business software for public and private sector organizations. The group has 3500 staff in 19 countries across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific and sales activities in other countries around the world. With 2007 sales of €321 million, Unit 4 Agresso is headquartered in Sliedrecht, the Netherlands and publicly traded on Euronext Amsterdam (Symbol: U4AGR).