Nicole Parkman, the Project Manager of the new PAWS system, has been working at TCNJ over the past 3 years.   She comes to TCNJ with over 13 years of Higher Education experience and has been working with PeopleSoft for the past 8 years.

Nicole started her career at Iona College in Westchester, NY working in the Student Financial Services Office as the Bursar.  Iona purchased the PeopleSoft Student System and Nicole accepted the role of Student Financials Lead. From there, Nicole took a position as a consultant implementing PeopleSoft at various institutions such as University of Massachusetts, Bowie State University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Salisbury University.

Nicole encouraged TCNJ to use this new system implementation as an opportunity to make broken business processes more effective and streamlined.  The project team did an analysis of how we were doing business and created new more effective ways to do things that benefit the staff and students. This past month TCNJ started using the registration functionality and it was the first time students had an opportunity to use the PAWS system. Their response has been wonderful.

The new system provides students, staff and faculty with many new features. It cuts down on paper processing allowing our TCNJ staff to spend more time servicing the students.  Some new features that the new system provided for TCNJ are:

• Automated Advising Report- allowing students to run a report to determine what courses they still need to graduate.
• What if Report- showing students if changing their major will keep them on track to graduate.
• Financial Aid/Admissions to dos – telling students what paper work has already been handed in, reducing the calls asking “Did you get my W2s?”.
• Direct Deposit Refunding- If a student has a credit on their account; the new system can send that credit right to the student’s determined bank account.
• Real Time Posting of Payments- When a student makes a payment that payment will automatically show on the student account and  financial holds will be automatically removed when the balance due is 0.
• Financial Aid estimated award viewing- students can view their estimated awards via PAWS Self Service.
• Course Shopping Cart- students place classes in their “shopping carts” like at amazon.com. This means when their actual registration window comes up all they need to do is click one button and their registration is complete.

The PAWS Team has a web site that can be accessed at http://www.tcnj.edu/~it/paws/.