Training administration and skills management software provider, Consensus IT Ltd, announced today that Roffey Park, the executive education and research organisation, has purchased its CourseBooker software in order to streamline its legacy systems from six down to one, thus providing easy management of and access to information across all departments.

Roffey Park, based near Horsham in West Sussex, is one of the longest established executive education providers in the UK with a focus on Leadership, People Management, Personal Effectiveness, Human Resources and Organisational Development. Half of Roffey Park's business is bespoke, designing and delivering learning interventions to organisations. The other half is the provision of open and qualification programmes and a wide range of conferences and regular seminars, aimed at executives, managers, and HR professionals. On average, Roffey Park runs 100 programmes per year, for over 2,000 executives, managers and HR professionals, all from one site with a staff of 70 people.

Roffey Park became a victim of its own success as its old legacy systems made it increasingly difficult to effectively manage the rapidly growing number of programmes and participants. As Jeremy Northeast, head of IT and learning technologies at Roffey Park, explained: "We have six different systems running concurrently, for our financial systems, accommodation booking, programme booking and administration, marketing and management reporting. The result is duplication of data and effort plus many manual administrative processes. With separate systems running within each of our business streams it is difficult to gain a single view of our business."

Driving this project is a need for Roffey Park to better understand it's clients as well as it's own operational performance. The existing bespoke systems were developed in-house using Microsoft Access, had no support and could not provide the vital information needed to get an overview of either how the organisation was performing, or of each customer. When looking for a solution, Roffey Park was originally considering commissioning a bespoke solution. However, following a recommendation from a neighbouring college, Northeast contacted Consensus and, as a result, decided it would be more beneficial to implement CourseBooker as a single, central resource for all of the data that was previously spread across so many different systems. This will join up the different departments of our business and allow us to focus on the business as a whole.

Northeast continued: "The amount of time staff spend entering and maintaining data will be reduced, and it will help us a great deal in understanding the needs of our customers.

The project is currently in the planning stage, with completion due by mid-October. Consensus will install CourseBooker and provide training for the 15 consultants/tutors and 20-25 administration/booking staff who will use the system.

Adam Hart, business development manager at Consensus, said: "A recent survey at the CIPD HRD show recognised a growing need for training at CEO level, particularly in the areas of people management, leadership and communications skills. This is confirmed by the continuing success of Roffey Park, but also meant an increased need to keep a closer eye on bookings and its service offering as a whole to ensure that the right courses were being offered, which they will be able to do with CourseBooker."

In the future, Roffey Park is hoping to expand the project and move towards online booking facilities.