Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi provides education in a Māori cultural context to 6,000 students and Tribal Group won the contract following an extensive procurement process.

The organisation’s vision is to “pursue knowledge to the greatest depths and its broadest horizons, and to empower the descendants of Awanuiārangi and all Māori to claim and develop their cultural heritage”.

Under the contract Tribal Group’s Student Management System (SMS) will meet the educator’s requirements including the need to:

• improve the student experience from enquiry, application and enrolment through to graduation and alumni,
• improve service delivery by managing quality, reducing risk and cutting turnaround times,
• create efficiencies for the organisation by improving reporting and lines of communication and reducing time and cost caused by workarounds
• improve accessibility of staff to student information to enable improved result and programme management, auditability, and transparency
• integrate timetabling, rostering and attendance marking to enable improved management of these areas

“Our current SMIS plateaued in its ability to service the needs of our staff and students.  We looked for a replacement system that would improve the student experience from their first enquiry to graduation, increase our accessibility to information and enable us to better manage our programmes,” Wiremu Doherty, CEO, Awanuiārangi, explained.

“We selected Tribal as they met our business needs in a forward-thinking way. Their product offers powerful workflows, reporting solutions, integrated timetabling, and various stakeholder portals. Furthermore, Awanuiārangi is looking forward to implementing a system that is focussed on delivering an excellent student experience and improving operational efficiency.”

The core Student Management System (SMS) will be based on Tribal’s ebs, hosted in the Tribal Cloud, and will also include the ebs:intel extension for business intelligence reporting, delivered via third party partner, Panintelligence.

Alongside ebs will sit Tribal’s Student Marketing and Recruitment, Event Management and Alumni Management Solutions.

Tribal said these CRM solutions are specifically tailored to the needs of the education sector and built on the Microsoft Power Platform - and delivered in the cloud and specifically built for the education sector, extending the capability of ebs to construct and maintain a full 360 degree view of the student from initial enquiry to alumni management.

Awanuiārangi will also adopt Tribal’s Student Engage mobile app as a private social network to connect the entire Wānanga community. It will engage students, staff, departments and businesses and provide students with a secure collaborative space to learn and support each other.  

Tribal says this latest contract win adds to the organisation’s increasing number of Student Management Solution customers in the tertiary education sector in New Zealand and will be the ninth customer to implement ebs in two years.

Steve Exley, Tribal’s General Manager - New Zealand, said, “We’re delighted that Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi has chosen to adopt a full suite of Tribal solutions to manage the student journey.

“It is a significant win for Tribal being the first customer in New Zealand to adopt our Student Marketing and Recruitment, Event Management and Alumni Management Solutions as well as the Student Engage App. We are pleased to be on the journey with Awanuiārangi and are looking forward to continuing the relationship and kicking off the implementation.”

The project commenced in early March with initiation and discovery workshops underway and Tribal says Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi plans to go live with phase one of the implementation in June 2022.