Tom Makosky, CEO Tom Makosky, CEO at Aptron Corporation, points out that the higher education space has significantly changed over the years since the early 1980’s. Candidly, the curriculum, classes and even the campuses have evolved, offering novel opportunities to learn, teach, and shape the minds of future generations. Part of the evolution has been shaped by technology, and the cloud and mobility, offering new capabilities for enterprise software to run higher education institutions more effectively and efficiently. Aptron has been a witness and an active contributor toward the evolution of education space. In fact, the company helped pioneer the switch to browser-based, “self-service” applications in the 1990’s, revolutionizing how students registered for classes, paid their bills and monitored progress toward their degree. This gave students and faculty quicker access and more control over their educational process while allowing administrative staff at a school to have more time to help students rather than being solely data processors.
Today, Aptron offers the Collegix platform, spanning five decades of deployments that predate the company itself. In its modern avatar, Collegix enterprise software delivers a truly integrated suite of applications that automate processes and workflows, including student lifecycle management, recruiting and admissions, financial aid, HR, finance and advancement. It powers the higher education experience by using a common database to integrate on-line self-service for students and faculty while optimizing the performance of administration, office personnel, and staff. The platform can be customized and optimized to meet any institution’s specific requirements be it a college, university or other higher educational institution. “While many colleges and universities operate in much the same way as their competitors, Aptron recognized early on that each institution needed software that supported their unique brand of education,” remarks Makosky.
We base our success on the success of our customers and our ability to help them not only with their common challenges, but also with their unique traits and processes
Thus Aptron software has been designed to be flexible, adaptable, and ever changing to meet each education institution’s academic methodology, policy and work flows.
“In addition to the inherent flexibility of Collegix, Aptron’s strength lies in our honesty, integrity, and caring attitude,” says Makosky. “We base our success on the success of our customers and our ability to help them not only with their common challenges, but also with their unique traits and processes.” Brenau University’s Non-term processing is an interesting case study that explains the prowess of Aptron. Brenau designed a new cohort-based program which required unique processes for registration, billing, financial aid and transcripts that are based on weeks attended and credits earned rather than traditional term-based processing. Aptron’s Collegix software offered support to their new cohort program that quickly accessed the requirements, designed the needed changes to the software and had everything operational in time for the first class that fall. This success was both a tribute to the flexibility of Collegix and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Aptron personnel.
It is the self-effacing work culture and passionate teams that have made the company a stellar performer and hit among its clients. Aptron has just completed engineering a multi-school Collegix Cloud that offers the advantages of hosted infrastructure yet continues to provide software that will support the unique needs of institutions. For the future, “we are working toward a Next Generation Student System that will support term, non-term and competency based programs while delivering a rich user experience for students, faculty and administrators,” assures Makosky. “Our next gen system will utilize Web services to tightly integrate and operate with CRM, LMS and other key software components, be they on premise or in the Cloud.”
