Client Success Story - Community College of Philadelphia
Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) is Philadelphia's largest public institution of higher education. With a student enrollment of approximately 37,000, classes are held at the school's main campus, three regional centers, and more than 50 neighborhood and business locations. CCP uses the CS Gold® campus card system from CBORD® to manage access to its facilities.
CCP faced unique challenges when shopping for campus card technology. While the school was very interested in implementing a comprehensive one-card system, budgetary constraints limited the amount of functionality that could be initially purchased. Bill Bromley, Project Manager for the Information Technology Services department at CCP, had to justify a purchase decision while minimizing costs.
"Before I started work here, the college had gone to bid for a one-card system and decided to postpone the decision due to budgetary constraints," says Bromley. "When I was later tasked with purchasing a system, I chose to look at the project as an ongoing agreement with the provider—not something that needed to be done all at once. I took the approach of splitting the implementation up into smaller pieces, to accomplish the same end. That's how we ended up going with CS Gold."
CCP began its CS Gold implementation with the CS Entitlements™, CS Locations, and CS CardLink™ modules of CS Gold. This allows the school to use ID cards for monitored access at multiple sites, and also take advantage of simplified card production. Bromley plans to implement solutions for vending, unmonitored door access, parking, and cafeteria POS functionality as time goes on.
Student satisfaction
Facility access at CCP has been significantly improved since the implementation of CS Gold. The school's previous system required students to manually type in identification numbers, then present photo ID to gain admittance to college facilities. Bromley explains: "With hundreds or thousands of students entering a building on any given day, this was a very cumbersome process. Card swipes have sped up admittance ten-fold—we are down to one or two seconds per student."
Feedback from CCP students has been positive. "They have been very appreciative," says Bromley. "Carrying and using the card has become part of their routines. Very rarely do we have students come in without their cards—it has become a part of their lifestyles."
Oracle compatibility
CCP is using CS Gold 5.0, which supports the Oracle® 10g database. According to Bromley, this feature is well worth an upgrade from previous versions.
"The Oracle 10g support makes it a no-brainer," says Bromley. "We were already working with 10g, so it is nice to have the interoperability with CS Gold."
