2017/2018 Newsletter - PowerSchool

2017/2018 Newsletter

2017/2018 newsletter at a glance

Welcome New Customers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Letters from . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4atrieveERP Integrated Product Suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Product Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Product Development Roadmap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Enhancements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8-10atrieveERP External Job Postings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Client Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13-14Client Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Product Development Roadmap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

What’s New for atrieveERP

OUR NEW atrieveERP CUSTOMERS

Please join us in welcoming these districts to our expanding and dynamic customer community.

atrieveERP is pleased to announce 5 new customers into the community. 2 hail from Manitoba and 3 from Alberta.

Living Waters Catholic Schoolsin Whitecourt, ABLive: January 2017Size: 2,000 students in 6 schools

Brandon School Divisionin Brandon, MBLive: October 2017Size: 8,562 students in 22 schools

Pine Creek School Divisionin Gladstone, MBLive: April 2018Size: 1,036 students in 7 schools

Lakeland Catholic Schoolsin Bonnyville, ABLive: July 2017Size: 2,000 students in 8 schools

KTC Education Authorityin Atikameg, ABLive: September 2017Size: 600 students representing

5 First Nations (Woodland Cree, White-fish Lake, Loon River, Lubicon Lake, and Peerless Trout First Nations)

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Invest In Your Success

Lindsay SpadavecchiaGeneral [email protected]

4powerschool.com/solutions/student-information-system-sis/atrieveerp | 877-772-4685

2017/2018 newsletter

I wanted to thank you all for your commitment this year as we successfully integrated atrieveERP into the PowerSchool product family. Last year, we talked about how PowerSchool would continue investing additional resources to improve your experience and I want to assure you that we continue to be committed to Canada and atrieveERP.

Since we’re talking about Canada, I would be remiss in not wishing you all a happy 150th anniversary. At PowerSchool, we just celebrated our own birthday this August by commemorating 20 years of improving the K-12 experience and student outcomes in schools and districts around the world. Over that time, we have continuously developed innovative solutions that educators, students, and parents are able to use every day.

Our mission is to power student success for a brighter future—the atrieveERP product line is helping us achieve that goal and we look forward to achieving it together.

~ Hardeep Gulati

On this, the 150th anniversary of Canada, PowerSchool celebrates atrieveERP, the Canadian ERP of choice. The atrieveERP group has grown over this last year through resource investment and exciting changes are afoot. PowerSchool has made a large investment into the technology and software structure of atrieve to keep pace with the solutions customers have come to expect.

PowerSchool and atrieveERP have long worked side-by-side in Canada and as we continue to grow our teams together, we strive to deliver a better customer experience and offer you the opportunity to leverage a broad set of complementary solutions. Creation is a powerful thing. Power in creation can be even more meaningful when it comes as a result of partnership. Whether it be a new product, training services, or a support call, atrieveERP and PowerSchool are there working, in partnership, alongside you.

You have heard many times that joy is found in the journey. It is our journey with you, from the day you join the atrieveERP customer community to the day we celebrate your 25th year running our software that we continue to find great joy. There are many stories and journeys to share, so much collaboration and innovation to celebrate, and much, much more to come. We, atrieveERP and PowerSchool, thank you for your support as we continue the journey together.

~ Lindsay Spadavecchia

Hardeep GulatiChief Executive OfficerPowerSchool Group [email protected]

Letters from:


atrieveERP Product Diagram

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Sales

Roxanne BurtonRegional Sales [email protected]

T: 877-722-4685 ext. 2138



The true spirit of Canadians—Celebrating Canada’s 150th

It was a very dry, hot summer and now the leaves are turning colour and falling from the trees. Fall is officially here and back to school start-up has come and gone. For many of our school districts, this year was a challenging one. The forest fires in BC, Alberta and south of the border played havoc through the summer and into September. We had two of our districts that had to evacuate their board offices not knowing when they would be allowed to return. The stress and challenges of these situations can be overwhelming, but the districts did not have to face this alone. Many neighbouring school boards were there assisting with re-location, staff accommodation and other resources to try and minimalize the impact.

PowerSchool was there for these districts ensuring that their critical operating systems were safe. For one of our boards, this meant an unplanned server move to our hosting facility of their on-premise equipment. The atrieveERP staff rose to the occasion and worked nights and over the weekend to ensure the customers data files were safe and that payroll would get to the bank. This represents a true Canadian spirit – everyone reaching out to assist wherever possible in the face of tragedy. I am proud to be part of a team and organization that cares for their customers.

Our goals at PowerSchool continue to be those that will have the largest impact on our customers. Some of our big projects this year are a portal renewal project (HTML5) and technology conversion from OpenVMS. The result will be an intuitive user interface that will assist boards in their day to day jobs. New products offerings include OH&S (product is live in 5 BC school boards and 1 Alberta school board), External Job posting, journal entry rewrite and purchasing card rewrite. We also started our KTO service offering this spring providing boards faster access to service resources for training and assistance.

If you are interested in knowing more about our products and services, please feel free to reach out to me at anytime. [email protected] or call 1-877-772-4685 Ext 3403. Wishing all of you the best for a great school year!

mailto:Roxanne.Burton%40powerschool.com?subject=


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Collaboration is Key!

Product Growth Strategy for 2017 & Beyond

I want to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for sharing their insight about our current and future product offerings. We believe that each customer brings a wealth of insight into the needs of their school district, and sharing this information helps us to improve the atrieveERP suite of products.

Reviewing requirements and design in collaborative sessions with our customers ultimately leads to shorter development cycles, because the requirements are well understood, and leads to greater customer satisfaction, as our customers and our analysts work together to jointly design new features.

In addition to collaborating on new product features, we receive requests for enhancements to existing products. Each enhancement request is reviewed thoroughly by representatives from our Product, Development, Support and Services teams each month and, based on a set of acceptance criteria, may be considered for inclusion in future releases of the product.

We are pleased to say that in the first half of 2017 we have implemented and released 48 product enhancements, requested by our customers, in the areas of HR, Finance and Payroll. The second half of the year is shaping up to be equally successful with already over 40 enhancements set to be delivered before the end of the year.

Product Management

Catherine LofvendahlProduct [email protected]




Throughout the coming years, we are making significant technology investments to ensure the future growth, performance, and scalability of atrieveERP. On-going projects such as, the VMS Conversion, Portal Refactoring and HTML 5 Upgrade will enable us to serve your district better; with access to more modern technologies we can enhance the overall user experience and provide more intuitive and streamlined interfaces.

Our growth strategy also includes investment into our existing product offerings that you rely on every day. Through enhancement requests submitted by our customers and internally by our subject matter experts, we are able to continually improve the atrieveERP suite of products, as well as build new and exciting features to make your job easier.

Our product growth strategy reflects our latest strategic plan, but based on current information available, priorities can change. We strive to continually evolve our product roadmap to align with your district’s needs.

JOURNAL ENTRY REDESIGN

The new Journal Entry landing page is intuitive, easy to use, and provides one-click access to many operations, such as:• Create new entry• Append to an open batch• Reverse a closed batch• Search Postings

As well as more advanced operations, such as creating reusable templates, or defining a reoccurring schedule.

Creating reusable Templates and Scheduling reoccurring entries is quick and easy and will save you time.

One of the product goals for atrieveERP is to improve the users’ experience. We want to design user interfaces that not only meet specific functional requirements, but are easy to understand, are visually appealing, and fast and easy to use.

Coming Soon!


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The spreadsheet layout of the Journal Entry detail page reduces the number of clicks and presents all relevant information on a single page.

The Journal Entry feature will continue to be enhanced in future releases including the ability to set up approval routing.




PURCHASING CARD REDESIGN

The new Purchasing Card feature allows you to conveniently manage your districts spending more efficiently. Once the monthly statement from your financial institution is uploaded, you can send out notifications to individual purchasing card holders, or to location approvers to review, update and submit for approval.

The purchasing card feature is integrated with atrieveFinance, allowing you to easily generate invoices for your purchasing card transactions.

This new feature will reduce time consuming administrative processing by shifting the focus to individual PCard holders to verify their purchases, update GL accounts, add descriptions, and attach receipts.

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Development

Michael CoxDevelopment [email protected]

2017 has been a productive year for the atrieveERP Development Team. We have adopted new development tools and development processes. These tools and processes have continued on an atrieveERP tradition of delivering a best in breed K-12 ERP solution. Two different source code parsing tools have been added to the product build processes. These tools provide automatic defect identification and code standardization recommendations that improve the product from the inside out.

The team has continued to invest in the existing technologies that are part of our product and work on long term goals that will see the transition from the native VMS Basic code to C#/.NET code. This migration includes the persistence tier moving away from VMS RMS to Microsoft SQL Server.

In addition to the VMS conversion project we are also working with one of our partner vendors to move the atrieveERP product away from using a Java Applet to being rendered natively in the browser using HTML5. This work will be a collaborative effort but the bulk of the migration work will be done by a third party so that the atrieveERP development team can continue to focus on development of new features.

External Job Posting has been released and is live at client sites and Journal Entry Web and P-Card is under active development.

The atrieveERP development team is the most passionate development team I have worked with. They are all individually contributing to the product ideas that get incorporated into the product. Working with a team that brings their own ideas and creativity into the products really shows how much they love what they work on and brings fresh life into it on a regular basis. The action of preprogramming code to this team is not just about programming the business logic but includes bringing their creativity into the product so that it continues to evolve.


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The atrieveERP Services team is incredibly proud of the enthusiasm that its clients have for our software! We are privileged to work with users who are brand new to our applications and users with 30+ years of hands-on experience. This range in experience offers up different perspectives and drives us to keep growing and improving our solution offerings.

This year, we have added two new services offerings; KTO ‘Keys to Ownership’ packages and an on-going seminar stream. These services were introduced to help our clients maximize the investment in their ERP software and take full advantage of the features and functionality that were designed to make their jobs easier. KTO packages can be pre-purchased and leveraged for consulting and training throughout the year. Our seminar program will demonstrate best practice use, software functionality and outcomes that can be achieved with different modules. They are generally run to accommodate the varying activities in a calendar year and can be helpful to introduce concepts to new and advanced users. Users can review the catalogue of seminar offerings, sign up and attend at their convenience.

Our software modules are tools designed to help perform tasks and meet objectives and it’s important to periodically reevaluate those objectives to examine if the software is helping to accomplish those goals. Whether the goal is reducing paper, improving workflow or providing easy-access to vital data, understanding the software’s capabilities will help ensure you are getting the most from your investment and seeing the greatest success. To help you reach your system’s full potential, we encourage regular re-investments in training and consulting services. Our team of experts can provide training on new features and functionality and expose the value of your ERP system. We look forward to working with you!

KEYS TO OWNERSHIP (KTO PACKAGES)Sold in 10-hour, 25-hour and 5-day blocks

When you need an atrieveERP expert, our Consultants are here. Knowing how to navigate and manage the software will provide you with the confidence to get your job done efficiently. We are happy to use our standard training agendas or collaborate on a tailored session. No need to leave your office; we provide the screen share and audio conferencing solutions.

Client Services

Renée TrudeauDirector of Client [email protected]




Client Services

ON-SITE TRAINING & CONSULTINGSold per day, travel and expenses not included

If an in-person experience is preferred, an atrieveERP Consultant can work with you and your team on-site. We can collaborate on a training agenda that serves you best. Consultants can train multiple resources in a group or individual setting to ensure understanding and adoption of the material.

HEALTH CHECK AUDITSBased on product modules used

The purpose of a Health Check Audit is to determine if your software use is aligned with best practice. Audits are conducted through a series of interviews, as well as program and database reviews. Consultants determine what is being used effectively and efficiently, and provide a report to detail the recommended course correction.

USER GROUPBased on conference package

Join us for our User Group conference! This annual conference is a unique collaboration between our committee of dedicated atrieveERP users and PowerSchool. The agenda is packed with informative sessions and great networking opportunities for beginner and advanced users. The conference is guaranteed to have something for everyone including one-on-one support sessions with our team of experts and the always popular “Ask a Developer” sessions. Watch for our fall invitation and come meet the team and network with this amazing peer-group.


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At this time, last year, when I was preparing the article for this brochure, I had no idea how much change was coming! Fast forward a year, and here we are – atrieveERP is a part of a PowerSchool!

I looked back as to when I had submitted the article and it was just two weeks before I woke to find a mandatory meeting invite in my email where it was announced that SRB Education Solutions – atrieveERP was acquired. That’s right, in just 2 weeks, my vision of what 2017 would look like was no more. I am not going to lie – my stomach did a significant flop and my brain was working overtime to sort out what this would mean not only for me, but for the entire atrieveERP team and our customers.

I am happy to report that overall the year has been a success! Yes, there have been a few bumps and we continue to address those as they come up. Focus on the new Knowledge Center had to be postponed; however, I can assure you that this and other new and exciting, innovative customer relationship tools will be the focus for the later part of 2017 and 2018.

The atrieveERP Support Team echoes the PowerSchool rally cry – “we are dedicated to a passion for the community and a passion for learning.” We are still learning how to be a part of a bigger company; but know, our passion for supporting our customers has not changed.

Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and/or read my article here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dreaded-word-aquisition-tracy-rose

EMAIL SUPPORT

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

KNOWLEDGE CENTRE

https://support.atrieveerp.com/Support.aspx

Client Support

Tracy RoseSupport Services [email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dreaded-word-aquisition-tracy-rose

mailto:atrieve.Finance%40powerschool.com?subject=

mailto:atrieve.HR%40powerschool.com?subject=

mailto:atrieve.Payroll%40powerschool.com?subject=

mailto:atrieve.Technology%40powerschool.com?subject=

https://support.atrieveerp.com/Support.aspx




Growth Strategy for 2017 & Beyond

1-877-772-4685

www.PowerSchool.com

SI-br-001-102317

Documents

2017/2018 Newsletter - PowerSchool