International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)


Case Study


Introduction

The International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) was established in 1983 fulfilling one of the major aspirations of the contemporary global Muslim community to regain the Ummah’s leadership in the quest for knowledge. This yearning of the Ummah is a key element in IIUM’s vision statement.


IIUM operates under the direction of a Board of Governors with representatives from the eight sponsoring governments and the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC). It maintains links with governments and institutions all over the world, such as the League of Islamic Universities, the International Association of Universities and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. It is also affiliated with several Malaysian-based businesses that provide opportunities for students to gain practical work experience. Currently, IIUM is home to 18,000 students and 3,000 teaching and administrative staff members. Many of the students and members of the academic staff are expatriates. In all, about 100 countries are represented.


Challenge and Solutions

As one of the largest Islamic International universities in Malaysia, IIUM faced the challenge of efficiently maintaining the accounting information pertaining to the students. This requirement raised the demand for a performance-oriented solution with rich functionalities to maintain diverse requirements. The solution had to be capable of maintaining crucial information on the student accounting, with the flexibility to adapt to the dynamic business needs in the education environment.


The Student Accounting System (SAS) n-tier architecture with object-oriented components and .NET framework are designed to the complexities of dynamic business requirements. The SAS for IIUM include the Fee Management, Sponsor Management and Loan Management System has resulted in an estimated of 40 – 50 percent in IIUM’s resources and time saving with 95% utilization of strategic resources in IIUM’s capacity planning.


Benefits

The implementation of SAS brings unparalleled critical operations


  • Accelerates mission critical operations and accounting functions to increase overall functionality.
  • Enables the processing of real-time student transactions to eliminate complex accounting work.
  • Integrates data mining capabilities that provide the accessibility of real time key performances indexes for strategic decision-making.
  • Maximizes technology investment by reducing Total Cost of ownership and improving Information Technology Investment per capita.
  • Designed ready for rapid integration with existing financial applications.
Recommendations

Moving forward, Student Accounting System (SAS) is focused on driving the constituent institutions to achieve greater business mobility with more user-centric approaches. As such, a fully integrated institutional system like SAS is able to rapidly integrate with existing financial applications.


SAS believes that the ultimate accounting package should accommodate the way institutions approach the business of education. With its open architecture, SAS is engineered to incorporate new levels of collaborative services and to deliver personalization information to disparate users.


As the new student population is becoming increasingly consumerist, traditional institutions must find ways to effectively maintain the accounting system.