NextERP: The Meaningful Solution to Ensure Student Safety

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an all-inclusive software that simplifies the organisation and management of school affairs by bringing together all the processes, departments and stakeholders in a simple and efficient manner. One of the major functions of a school ERP is to ensure the protection of student data, their privacy, safety and security. With the steady increase in crime rates against children, software such as an ERP has become a necessity for every school to ensure child safety

Highlights

• The ERP app allows the parents to keep track of their child’s location through their phones.
• The school transport system module in ERP ensures child safety during the journey, to and fro.
• The school visitor management module keeps an audit trail to record who picks up and drops off the child.
• Student data including personal details, marks, etc. is protected via authorisation of access.
• RFID chips are installed in student ID cards to detect whether the student is within the campus.
• The SMS alert system ensures that parents receive information related to their child.

Student safety has become a topic of concern in recent times with crime rates against children going up drastically. A large number of these cases could have been prevented had there not been any security lapses from the school’s side. The recent rape of a five-year-old boy a school peon in Delhi is just one among the hundreds of cases that are reported almost daily.

With the advancement in technology, threats to a child’s security are no longer just physical. Cybercrimes are on the rise with multiple cases of security breaches. There have been numerous incidents where student’s details were illegally accessed and tampered with. In this day and age, leakage of sensitive information such as Aadhar card number and bank details can even pose a threat to someone’s life. Ensuring student safety should be a top priority of any reputable school. However, by no means is it an easy task. Imagine keeping track of thousands of children every day –it will be tedious and not to mention the time, energy and cost consuming. It is in this scenario that software such as School Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) becomes crucial, helping them integrate all their managerial and organisational affairs. 

Next Education’s ERP software, NextERP, consists of multiple features specially designed to ensure the safety and security of students. With the help of such a system, keeping track of a student’s location, managing visitors and combating hackers become easy tasks.

Tracking student transport systems with GPS 

Parents place immense trust in the school transport system due to the assurance they provide of being the ‘safer’ option. But the recent murder of the seven-year-old by a school bus conductor in Delhi does make one question this promise of safety. Add to this the rising reports of rash driving, road accidents, etc. involving school buses. How ‘safe’ is school bus transportation? Whom are we trusting our children with? While most parents expect the school to have conducted proper background checks before employing their drivers, conductors, etc., this is rarely the case. More often than not, the school depends on a third-party vendor to take care of the transport system.

The transport module of NextERP has been built with the aim of putting parents’ minds to rest while making the whole process smoother and more efficient for school authorities. Its mobile application allows parents as well as schools to keep track of the school buses throughout their journey, to and fro with the help of GPS tracking. Parents receive constant communication regarding delays due to traffic or other factors. The system also allows the parent to check the speed of the bus, its current location, etc. This comes in handy in case of emergencies such as accidents and breakdowns, allowing for a swift response. The system keeps a check on the drivers, stopping them from taking unnecessary risks, deviating from the prescribed routes or driving recklessly, hence promoting safe driving.

Easy communication with parents

The best relationships are always born out of good communication. Schools and parents hold equal responsibility in a child’s development and therefore, it is always important to ensure that their relationship remains transparent and smooth. While this sounds easy, the school has to take care of thousands of students every year and maintaining constant and open communication with all parents would be a time-consuming task. But in today’s digital age, nothing can be deemed impossible, especially when it concerns the safety and security of the child.

The SMS alert system enabled by NextERP allows easy communication between the school and the parents. The school can easily notify the parents in case of emergency holidays, extra classes or extra-curricular activities, ensuring that the parents are always in the loop about their ward’s schedule. Changes in class timings due to natural calamities or sudden public holidays can also be communicated easily with the help of the broadcast SMS function. This puts the parents at ease and at the same time, saves the school staff the trouble of answering numerous calls every day. 

Attendance management system

Many students may not avail the school bus service,  especially once they are in higher grades. The number of cases of students playing truant is also more in higher grades. NextERP’s attendance module ensures that parents receive immediate SMS alerts in case their child is recorded absent, thus discouraging this tendency.

This facility works with the help of Radio-frequency identification (RFID). The RFID chips attached to the students’ ID cards make the entire attendance procedure electronic, thereby saving time as well as ensuring lack of inaccuracies. The time of arrival and departure of the child is recorded by the RFID detectors placed at the entrances and exits of the school. If placed outside the classroom, it allows the school to even take attendance for each class separately. Additionally, advanced RFID-based systems can also enable real-time tracking of students. 

School Visitor management system

The rising number of cases that are reported about imposters picking up children from school and drug dealers preying on unsuspecting students are shocking. In this light, it becomes important for the schools to be equipped with a solution that will help manage a student’s visitors and determine their authenticity. This is where NextERP’s visitor management system becomes extremely useful as it allows parents to create a list of visitors who would have access to the child. This ensures that children are picked up from school only by those authorised few. 

A one-stop solution like NextERP initially collects the photo-biometric details of the parents, guardians, etc. to ensure that their identity is always verified. The system maintains a vigilant record of the amount of time the child spends with the visitor, the purpose of their visit, etc. It also enables the school to maintain its security in a better manner, ensuring that the campus remains free of trespassers. 

Data security

In addition to the physical threats, data leakage and data hampering are also important security concerns that the school management should be prepared to combat. Ensuring student privacy and protecting their personal data is a responsibility that schools cannot shrug off. Leakage of confidential data such as address, bank details, etc. is a serious security breach that can have grave repercussions for all the major stakeholders and can even negatively impact the reputation of the school. 

Using NextERP ensures that all the details will be migrated to a cloud which automatically guarantees that your data will be encrypted and access will be limited. We have partnered up with Amazon Web Services cloud-computing technology, to ensure maximum data security. This ensures that all transactional details such as bank account number are dual encrypted and sent to a secure HTTPS connection, similar to bank transactions. In addition, the system allows the management to grant or revoke permissions to access classified or sensitive information at their discretion.

NextERP has recently scored as an Excellent Web Application in terms of cybersecurity and was awarded the Web Application Pentest Certificate provided by Beagle Security, certifying it as the perfect security blanket for online threats against a school.

Network security for schools

For any school, surveillance is often the most time-consuming and complicated task as it involves a huge workforce in addition to video monitoring, paging systems, backup systems, and other security measures. But when schools are spread across a vast geographical area, the management often finds itself stretched thin, leading to reduced effectiveness of the overall system and increased chances of security breaches. In this scenario, a school ERP system would integrate all these sections, allowing for the creation of a single network infrastructure that would enable administrators to maintain tighter control, thereby increasing productivity and reducing effort and cost. 

NextERP enables schools with multiple campuses to remain on top of their surveillance game by enabling a single login ID and password for all the schools. This allows the chief administrator to monitor all the schools under their authority with just a few clicks. 

With the transition to nuclear families and the consequent fast-paced metropolitan lifestyle, parents find it difficult to ensure the safety of their child around the clock in between their busy work schedules. NextERP makes this task easy, helping parents know about their ward’s whereabouts from their workplace or home with the help of their phones. It also eases the burden on the school, ensuring the safety and security of thousands of students using highly efficient and effortless methods.