Our Clients: John Abbott College

In August 2020, Sherri McGurnaghan, the information technology services manager at John Abbott College, realized the school needed a better Covid-19 check-in form to track students, staff, and visitors who visited campus — and she needed it before classes resumed in September. She had already planned on implementing FileMaker for another project, but this had a much tighter timeline. After some research, she wrote to Steven Barer at Oak Bay Softrends.

John Abbott College is located in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec, Canada, and offers post-secondary and continuing education to 7000 students, and is one of five English language CEGEPs (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel) in the province. In 2021 the school celebrated its 50th anniversary, unfortunately during a Covid-19 shutdown that kept students and staff off the physical campus for much of the year.

Classes were set to resume in September 2020, and the visitor check-in form they had been using simply wasn’t going to scale well when students returned to campus. JAC had been using a Microsoft form to track visitors, which worked when the numbers of people using it were fairly small. But with the potential for 150-1000 people visiting the campus each day, McGurnaghan knew they needed something much faster. Speed wasn’t the only issue — government reporting requirements meant the data the form collected needed to be turned into reports, the requirements for which shifted frequently.

With Allen Poole heading up development, Oak Bay Softrends came up with a plan that allowed a divide and conquer approach and would allow them to hit the tight deadline. Poole and McGurnaghan agreed that FileMaker was the perfect choice for rapid application development and deployment. The pair worked together to create a form that was quick for visitors to use, and also permitted campus security to easily review check-ins throughout the day.

“We gained efficiencies in being able to send out the reports and to generate new reports with historical data much more easily and quickly than we would have been able to do otherwise,” said McGurnaghan. “Oak Bay always rises to the occasion.”

Subsequently, McGurnaghan and Poole designed and implemented a FileMaker solution for capital requests. These requests, filed by department chairs, directors, deans and other staff, ranged from very simple to very complex.

“If the theater department was putting together a new workbench, that meant they had to file a request for every item on the bench — handling this with Excel as we had been doing meant a ton of repetitive data entry for each individual item,” McGurnaghan explained. “In fact, a department head found the process so onerous, they made a capital request for a new way to make capital requests!”

McGurnaghan had explored off-the-shelf procurement solutions, and dismissed most of them as overkill for the school’s needs, in addition to being fairly pricey. The custom FileMaker solution McGurnaghan and Poole worked on together is designed specifically for JAC’s needs, and the result serves everyone better, from requesters to reviewers. A key way FileMaker has streamlined the process is that it is pre-loaded with the school’s rooms and people, greatly reducing the time to complete a request and ensuring that requests are more accurate when they are submitted.

McGurnaghan is now working on phase 2 of the project, which will let the system work in 360 degrees — staff can submit a request, and then track its status from start to finish, including accessing historical requests for those returning after an extended absence.

McGurnaghan is pleased with the outcome, and with the experience of working with Oak Bay: “Always have an idea of where you want to get to. You may not know all the moving pieces, but know what your end goal is, and work backward from there. The Oak Bay team is awesome at grasping your goals and then guiding you through the process. I wouldn’t hesitate to use them for any project that crossed my desk!!”