nextstep MIS

Overview

As a part of their contract with the Learning Skills Council (LSC), nextstep contractors (IAG) have to provide timely, monthly statistical returns based on the number of information, advice and enhanced sessions given, with breakdown of service users ("clients") into groups by gender, ethnicity, age and other factors. Solid State Group work with a number of nextstep contractors to provide a customised web-based Management Information System (MIS) that allows them and their partners distributted across the county to input details of sessions online, enabling nextstep contractors to generate detailed reports for the LSC, automatically, instantly and accurately.

Background

nextstep contractors are responsible for managing the contract across regions of the UK, working with a large number of sub-contractors who are paid on the number of sessions they conduct. In early 2004, the collection of statistical report data for the monthly returns was labour-intensive, both for the administration teams and each of their providers. Each month, paper forms or bespoke spreadsheets with details of clients and sessions would have to be submitted by the providers and a detailed report classifying service users into groups manually created by nextstep contractors for submission to the LSC by an agreed cut-off date.

Objectives

Allow details of clients and the advice sessions to be added to the system by advisors via an easy to use web browser interface
Allow partners to monitor the progress of their careers advisors and clients using search facilities and reports
Allow central management at nextstep contractors to monitor progress across the whole county
Reduce time spent by partner organisations on submitting monthly returns and invoices to nextstep contractors
Save on contractors' administration costs associated with producing statistical returns, reports and LSC Batch Upload Files.
Improve efficiency for partners in searching for client details, advice session history, etc., allowing individuals to be tracked across the county
Provide full security of confidential client information.

Solution

With contractual obligations to meet, nextstep contractors need a high-quality and easy to use system for recording and tracking the advice sessions conducted by advisors and partners across the county. Solid State Group currently provides seven nextstep contractors with a tailored version of the MIS with high level of product functionality, flexibility and customisation at a reasonable price.

The MIS was introduced in early 2004, allowing partners to enter details of sessions into an online web-based database using a variety of predefined and free text fields. By storing these details the progress of clients, who can be referred to another provider or return for further enhanced sessions, can easily be tracked and assessed. This is important because as a part of the LSC contract, a percentage of clients need to be tracked one month and six months after their session to assess their progress and in turn the success of the programme. The MIS automatically flags these reviews with individual advisors for completion and provides predefined fields to ensure appropriate information is recorded.

The MIS has three different levels of user: administrators at the nextstep contractor's central office, partner managers and individual careers advisors. Each has access to different levels of functionality within the system in line with their responsibilities. Advisors can enter details of client advice sessions and track their own progress whilst the partner managers can track the progress of individual advisors and their organisation as a whole. The nextstep contractor administrators are able to easily produce a number of accurate standardised reports for the LSC covering any period for the whole county, predefined reports on individual partners to ensure that contractual obligations are being met and ad-hoc reports according to their own information needs, all without the need for further input or paper verification.

"Solid State Group's MIS has transformed the way that we manage our contractual obligations to the LSC and contracts with our partners. The administrative burden on both ourselves and our sub-contractors was time consuming, but now with an easy-to-use solution, we can use the reports from the system to analyse patterns of delivery to date, including achievement of our targets and impact outcomes. The MIS was flexible enough to meet the demands of the recent changes in statistical submissions to the LSC using batch file specification. Solid State were able to implement these changes within a very tight timeframe and with the minimum of disruption to the MIS users"

Account Manager, nextstep contractor

Since August 2005 Solid State has been involved in developing the system further to comply with the new LSC reporting methods using batch file specification. This has resulted in a successful transition of data being captured and submitted in this format since then.

About Solid State Group

Solid State Group is a content management, web applications and services consultancy which was founded out of a desire to provide solutions which were more time and cost-efficient.

Leveraging the managing partners experience in the IT consulting, financial and marketing sectors, Solid State Group has built a strong reputation for robust products that can be rapidly and effectively implemented across a broad range of industry sectors.

For more information please visit www.solidstategroup.com or call 0845 838 2163