The Berklee College of Music admissions staff recruits musicians from all over the globe, but with more than 300 auditions everyday, they needed an efficient and reliable way to take notes and record information about each performance in order to give all prospective students a fair shot at attending the Boston school. According to Campus Technology, the college has 120 staff members that meet with, interview and audition approximately 7,000 musicians every year.
While they traditionally carried this task out with laptops, Berklee dean of admissions Damien Bracken explained to the source that they were cumbersome, slow and inefficient.
Like most organizations that store large amounts of data, the school required this information to be stored in a single database, which they could do with laptops, but it was less than ideal. As soon as FileMaker Go for the iPad was released in July 2010, the admissions team jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of the customizable applications many benefits, the media outlet reports.
The school bought 20 iPads for its recruiters, and as Bracken explained, the process became significantly simpler. He told Campus Technology that the admissions staffers are able to type out information about each meeting with aspiring students and send the notes through the cloud to a main database that can be accessed remotely by anyone with the application.
"We get a lot of comments from students and parents when we pull out our iPads during auditions or check-in," Bracken told the source. "Using this type of technology is good for our image and consistent with our long-time reputation for being ahead of the curve."
Other organizations that want to improve their processes' efficiency and reliability can talk with a FileMaker developer that will build a custom mobile application that can be used for countless solutions.