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Student Information Systems have come a long way in helping traditional educational institutions get better in handling processes by simplifying them with technology.

Student admission and enrollment process is one of the trickiest of process for an educational institution. The larger the institution, the bigger the problem. The complexity also increases because of popularity, student/school proportion in an area, and such reasons. some of the factors that complicate this process are:

1. Time sensitive nature – As it requires lot of time to handle the applications received from the manual admission process and generate the results within the time constraints.
2. Need for co-ordination – Involves a lot of coordination between the individuals as well as teams to keep the proper process of the manual admission.
3. Keeping it cost effective – admission process is traditionally very laborious process as it requires resources to maintain and handle the large amount of admission applications. It is a challenge to keep manual process also cost-effective.
4. Error Prone – The process, being manual, is inherently error prone. Mistakes at this stage cause significant impact to the long term of schools’ success, especially if a deserving student is missed for some reason. Needless to say, students’ also miss the chance to be among the elite that institution offers.
5. Extremely Slow – Being manual process, the various layers of checks and data feeding involved, the process needs several resources deployed to be efficient. Unfortunately, this means more time in coordination and higher costs.
6. Tiring – Admissions usually happen in summers. Often students and parents have to stand in long queues in summer heat. Staff members also have to be on the field to manage queues and help prospective students and their care givers.
7. Eco-unfriendly – Lot of paper-work is required, resources to store and archive the papers which is not cost-effective as well as Eco-unfriendly.
8. Accountability – Manual admissions process does break inevitably as the institution grows and workload increases. It is also difficult to hold people responsible, thereby making it difficult to improve the system.
9. Vendors – Third party vendors might get involved in planning logistics. This adds to coordination which is usually not cheap.

To overcome the above problems and to cut down the cost, what educational institutes should prefer is to transform from the manual process to the automated system and adopt the technologies which can be cost effective as well as beneficial for the institutes. There are solutions available now that adopt latest technologies, processes and cloud based infrastructure to keep the process simple, light and gets the job done.