Project "Butterfly" Underway

In February 2012 Ferrum College signed an agreement to implement an Ellucian (formerly Datatel+SGHE) product named Colleague, which is an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) product.

A CRM product uses a database to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes. In Ferrum's case this means admissions, financial aid, finance, HR, advancement, registration, and student services will transition to one database and one system — thereby reducing costs and resources to maintain the College's many databases that are currently fragmented and out-dated.

We in human resources are delighted to be implementing Ellucian's product at Ferrum College! We recently visited Vikki Ingram, director of human resources for Bridgewater College, to see first-hand what Ellucian means for that HR department. What we saw confirmed for us that this Ellucian implementation will be well worth the effort. We were amazed at the efficiency with which everyday HR, payroll, and benefits processes were performed and the ease of access Ellucian allows employees to their own information. We came away eager to have our new Ellucian system up and running to make our employees’ HR experiences easier, less confusing, and more user-friendly. We believe you’ll come to see Ellucian as a very valuable tool, as we believe it will be for us in HR.

—MA Whisenant, director of human resources

I am excited about the Ellucian conversion because it will finally allow us to completely integrate all our information management at Ferrum. The IT staff have done a wonderful job of meeting our needs by doing programming and developing the i-Assistant interface, but our current database technology simply doesn’t meet our needs any more. The conversion will be a LOT of work for staff around campus, but from what I have seen the Colleague component of Ellucian will be a powerful one-stop shop for all the ways in which we work with applicants, students, and alumni at Ferrum. 

  — Dr. Jason Powell, dean, School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

Module leaders named the project "Butterfly" —  a substantial project, scheduled to take 20 months to complete.  

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Module leaders meet every Thursday from 3:30 – 4:30 pm. Members include:

• Betsy Smith
• Bryan Hantman 
• Delia Heck 
• Diana Yates (also core team member)
• Felicia Woods 
• Gilda Woods (also core team member)
• Heather Hollandsworth (also core team member)
• Jason A. Jones (also core team member)
• Jason Powell
• Jolene D. Hamm (also core team member)
• Kathi Renick (also core team member)
• Lawrence Chernick 
• MA Whisenant (also core team member)
• Shawn P. Shirley (also core team member)
• Timothy Belcher 
• Vicky A. Robertson (also core team member)
• Virginia Jones 
• Yvonne Walker (also core team member)

The "core team" meets every Thursday from 10:00 am – 12:00 noon.