The University of South Wales (USW) is a major player in UK higher education. With campuses in Cardiff, Pontypridd (Treforest) and Newport, the University has over 28 000 students and over 2 000 members of staff. USW has an estate with over 80 buildings, which are cumulatively over 150 000 m2.
The University of South Wales puts strong emphasis on prioritising student experience, as such it is important that it makes the most of the space available to it and uses the space in a way that is most beneficial to the student. As more new technologies develop that can help give more insight into the efficiency of a University campus and its processes, USW are keen to invest in those that help improve student experience and future-proof the University.
A key focus for these improvements needs to be the quality and efficiency of the estate. At the moment USW have extremely poor space utilisation which at 17 % is way below the UK average for the sector. The implications of this are a clear need to improve that quality and efficiency, a need to look at timetabling processes and the estate together to allow the University to drive that change.
The University wishes to implement a system that allows continuous monitoring of both the utilisation of the estate and the efficiency of timetabling processes. This will allow USW to challenge the way that rooms are being booked and used by highlighting key issues, for example where rooms are being booked but not used, or where the occupancy of a room is frequently far less than the capacity. The result needs to be a greater understanding of the amount of space required to deliver a high-quality learning environment, eventually allowing the University to reduce its footprint and improve the quality of the space it retains.
Any new system and supporting processes need to be:
1) The system should be able to accurately and continually, measure and record the utilisation of individual rooms within the University to allow effective monitoring of the utilisation of the estate. Utilisation data should identify the number of users of a room or space at any particular time;
2) The system should provide graphically displays and trends that allow the user to easily analyse utilisation;
3) The system should have the capability to integrate out of our timetabling software to provide us both with real time and historical utilisation data and show how it compares to our timetabled sessions. The University uses Scientia Syllabus Plus (on prem) and you should allow for the timetabling data to be integrated into your system/application. You should make sufficient development time allowances to ensure this is achieved, including the full costs of integration services with Syllabus Plus;
4) The system needs to allow us to export utilisation data into various formats (.csv, .xlsx) for analysis outside of the system;
5) The system should have the capability and flexibility to integrate with existing and future API to allow USW to expand the usage of the system over time.