Reaping Long-Term ROI Over Eight-Year Partnership with Tambellini Group

When a prestigious national R1 university first began a multiyear initiative to improve student services in 2015, its technology leadership reached out to Tambellini Group with a straightforward request for the comprehensive annual 2023 Student Systems US Higher Education Market Share, Trends, and Leaders Report.

This in-depth report is a common entry point for Tambellini Group clients, as it is the only research of its kind that provides thorough and unbiased data and analysis detailing every student systems provider serving at least 1 percent of the US market, including product profiles detailing their features and functionality, as well as implementation and selection trends among various institutions by size and affiliation.

Since that initial report request eight years ago, the university’s partnership with Tambellini Group has grown and evolved in tandem with its student services project and numerous additional strategic initiatives.

The institution’s managing director of Information Systems noted that engaging with Tambellini team brought remarkable ROI at every step of their modernization journey thanks to partnership benefits, including valuable proprietary research and personalized guidance from Tambellini advisors and analysts, who have an unparalleled understanding of both the higher education landscape and technology.

Coordination & Consensus Building

As an elite national R1 institution with an affiliated medical center and numerous campuses domestically and abroad, the university’s schools span a wide range of disciplines and include a combined total of +30,000 students (undergraduate and postgraduate) and nearly as many faculty and staff.

With such a diversity of stakeholders, disciplines, and priorities spread across a large, decentralized institution, every modernization project—whether specific to a particular office or university-wide—is a complex undertaking requiring tremendous internal coordination and consensus building across departments to succeed in the long term.

Because the Tambellini team has extensive firsthand experience working as institutional leaders, they understand the importance of ensuring all university decision-makers are on the same page and share a common knowledge of the potential tools and approaches that can help them reach their goals.

Whether the university is focusing on setting its enterprise CRM strategy with the admissions and advancement offices or working with provosts and academic leaders on enhancing academic planning tools, Tambellini Group’s team and resources accelerate the level-set with a broad diversity of internal stakeholders.

Milestones & Impact

Over the past eight years with Tambellini, the university has made significant progress in streamlining and improving its operations to realize greater efficiencies and better serve its community. From the beginning of each ongoing initiative, they have utilized Tambellini Group’s market insights to understand their options for feasible strategic approaches and the pros and cons of available tools and platforms.

Here are some recent milestones the institution has achieved:

• Enterprise CRM: Developed and implemented an enterprise CRM strategy without disrupting point solutions.
• Admissions and Recruitment: Adopted a common graduate admissions and recruitment system across all schools to provide a more consistent, user-friendly experience.
• Financial Aid: Designed and implemented a financial aid shared services foundation for greater compliance and student service delivery.
• Course Registration and Planning: Hired its first university-wide registrar and implemented a university-wide digital course catalog and consolidated academic calendar.

For each of those accomplishments and more, Tambellini Group’s customized market reports, individual advisory sessions, and vast library of timely market research have helped the institution gain an impartial yet comprehensive 360-degree view of every factor to consider in making their decisions, including budgets and timelines, security and risk management, implications for both short and long-term planning, integrations, and industry best practices.

It’s inevitable with so many moving parts that this university often engages external technology consultants and implementation partners to help with their initiatives. According to the managing director, another benefit of working with Tambellini Group is its impartiality compared to consultants with a vested interest in recommending specific vendors and limited expertise confined to working with those vendors.

The longer the university works with Tambellini, the more value it gains from its partnership because of its trust in the Tambellini team to understand its internal dynamics and priorities and provide unbiased advice and information customized for their needs.