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People wishing to enrol at the Caribbean Maritime Institute (CMI) can now do so at the click of a mouse. This has been made possible through the CMI's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System online application portal, which was launched recently.

The ERP system provides a step-by-step interactive guide for enrolment at the institution and registration for classes with project manager, Sonia Brown, describing the system as"user-friendly" .She said that within a few days of the launch over 100 applications were received. "This is good traction and we are encouraged by that,"she noted.

Brown said the ERP is intuitive and provides for easy information management. "What we try to do is to pre-empt questions that persons may want to ask when they apply to an institution and put them there, so when applicants go online, we know who they are and exactly what they want,"she pointed out.

The CMI is the first tertiary institution in the Caribbean to use a full-scale ERP system to run the entire business processes of the school along with its online education platform.

Management Information System (MIS) and Technology Manager at the CMI, Douglas Dyer, explained that the ERP represents a category of business management software that integrates varied organisational systems and processes.

"It provides an integrated and holistic view of business processes in real time because it operates from one central data storage,"he said. He noted that although the institution already had a Student Management System in place, it did not communicate with the Accounting and Human Resource Software"so reconciling students'payments was difficult since it was a manual process."

"We chose to break from the tradition of using interfaces and implement an ERP solution,"he said.