You’ll see the traditional baby-faced freshmen roaming the campus of Texarkana College, many of them recent high-school graduates looking to jump-start their education by picking up credits at this community college in northeast Texas. But you’ll also see students in their 30s, 40s or even older—people preparing for mid-career changes or taking a second shot at the degree that eluded them in their youth. “A great place to start . . . or start over” is the college motto.
Students attend Texarkana College in part because the school keeps its tuition affordable. The college leadership makes every purchasing decision with an eye toward containing expenses, but without sacrificing quality.
When it came time to choose a new ERP provider, Texarkana leaders knew the decision was an important one. Make the right decision on a new ERP provider, and they could contain or even reduce costs. After a thorough search, they decided on Jenzabar.
“Our previous ERP was an expensive, hosted system that required significant IT resources to manage and maintain,” explains Michael Dumdei, Texarkana’s vice president of information technology. “And the user interface was difficult to master, making it hard for departmental users to learn the system.”
Dumdei recognized that by switching to Jenzabar One, he could drastically cut hiring and operational costs. Since Jenzabar One is based on Microsoft SQL, it requires no specialized skills to run. That meant Dumdei could devote much fewer resources to recruiting and retaining top quality IT staff. And because Jenzabar One is so easy to manage, it freed the IT staff to spend more of their time supporting faculty, staff and students.
Dumdei also racked up savings in training costs. “The Jenzabar system is so user-friendly. We can quickly take a new employee through the steps of registering students or any of the common activities. It doesn’t take a long training session to get people up to speed.”
No matter how much money an ERP system saves you, those savings can quickly disappear if the system fails to keep pace with changes in technology. Jenzabar’s commitment to supporting and updating its products convinced Dumdei that the savings would keep on coming. “We have been using Jenzabar’s ERP for a while, and Jenzabar continues to improve the product. They are so nimble at adapting to changing technologies, and meeting our evolving needs.”
When he added up all the ways switching to Jenzabar saved the college money, Dumdei almost couldn’t believe the result. “Converting to Jenzabar led to one of our biggest spending cuts over the last few years. The college realized an annual reduction in costs approaching $1 million.”
It’s not every day an IT director gets to make a million-dollar decision. But for Dumdei, his decision wasn’t all about the money. “We found all components of Jenzabar’s solution easier to manage and more flexible than our previous system. Without question, the overall experience is a significant improvement. It is hard to say enough 
good things about the Jenzabar product development team.”
To learn more, visit https://www.jenzabar1.com/texarkana
