To nurture leaders of tomorrow with relevant skills, SP Jain School of Global Management Institute has adopted latest and best practices followed across the globe, says Hrishikesh Mehendale, CFO, SP Jain School of Global Management, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
Today students have many options available to choose from in terms of streams and specializations. What are the top considerations that need to be kept in mind while taking these decisions? How can technology help them in this decision making?
There has been a radical shift in the world of education and I totally agree with the fact that there are innumerable options available to the younger generation. We are looking at a generation which bears in mind, their goals and aspirations and are focused towards their aim. There are certain considerations that in my opinion, every student should ponder upon, before jumping on to conclusions. The first and the foremost factor is to evaluate the positives and negatives of joining an institute and whether that institute is providing and catering to the essential needs of students or not. It should not only restrict to the needs of conventional teaching methods but introduce modern day technology as well.
Technology is an essential for youngsters of today.The millennial’s connection with technology is one of a kind. We don’t even need to teach them about it because they already understand it so well. Therefore, we have realized that the combination of technology and education have the potential to break the barriers in the minds of kids and can help them become future ready as well as industry ready.
There have been a lot of conversations around emerging technologies like IoT, AI and VR/AR. How is the education sector getting affected by these technologies?
Emerging technologies like AI and Machine Learning are set to transform the education sector in two ways. First educators and education institutes will have no option but tolearn to live with these technologies as they will be a central to every student’s life in the future. Theywill need to start using new technologies to increase our efficiencies by automating repetitive tasks like taking attendance, sending out fees reminders, alumni outreach etc. Educators can leverage technologies like virtual reality, which will enhance the experience of students and can enable better learning and retention of information.
The other aspect is to bring the current generation up to speed for the future. There is a severe talent crunch in the market. Organisations are not able to find workforce with suitable skill-sets. These skill-sets primarily include analytics, data science, gamification etc. The workforce should not only be able to understand these technologies but should also be able to leverage them for business benefits for their employers. Educational institutes should give impact knowledge to their students to not just to help them earn a living but should enable them to add value to their own lives.
What is the role that technology in helping you in functioning seamlessly across campuses, considering that you have multiple locations including overseas?
Our vision is to be the business school recognised around the world for its innovative, influential and relevant education. We pursue our vision by being innovative and professional, earning respect and trust from all our stakeholders. We are in the continuous process of achieving our vision across our campuses across 4 cities including Dubai, Singapore and Sydney. Technology plays an exceedingly important role to keep the world class quality of the education courses that we offer. We continuously share best practices, challenges and achievements regularly via fast communication. Every country has a different set of compliance issues. It is with the help of technology that we have been able to keep pace with different and ever-changing compliance scenarios across locations.
In India, we have implemented Oracle ERP Cloud as it does not require continuous time-intensive and costly upgrades, gives immediate access to new capabilities and features as they become available and have enabled us to achieve our vision. With the help of such cutting-edge technologies, we have been successful in creating an environment of innovation across our campuses.
How best can a university inculcate the virtue of entrepreneurship amongst its students? How are you planning to churn out more employable students? Will technology be an enabler here?
Technology is the game changer that plays an exceedingly important role in promoting innovation, experimentation, thus leading to entrepreneurship. This is the reason we chose cloud technology. With such state of art technology, we have been able to provide our students with complete freedom for experimentation, to given them the space to grow and thrive. We understand the industry requirements for the future. Our technology implementations can give our students the opportunities to delve deeper in their researches and provide any work-related information from anywhere across the globe available to our students.
Why did you choose Oracle ERP Cloud? What were the challenges that you were facing before this implementation and how has Oracle ERP Cloud helped in addressing these challenges?
Every education institute have two set of activities – academic and non-academic. This is the reason that we were looking for a platform which can unify all these activities to make monitoring and evaluating possible. Technology should be able to lend complete transparency by giving access to the right information to faculty, students and to the parents at the right time. Most importantly, all the operations should be integrated to provide maximum efficiency.
The decision to move to Oracle Cloud ERP was based on many factors. The SaaS model being a subscription-based model – ensured a lower total cost of ownership, reduced overhead, as the need to buy license, additional hardware and overhead for upkeep of hardware is eliminated completely. Time to value, ease of implementation, the ability to try before you buy, and the ongoing vendor accountability and engagement, were among other factors that we thought of.
Oracle ERP Cloud not only provides robust support by giving easy access to ERP system but is also cost-effective. We were able to easily understand the interface and have also experienced its ease to maintain and upgrade. Also, the cloud solutions easily integrated between heterogeneous software systems.
