Edge cases

What are edge cases?

Edge cases are situations which are seen only once in a while. But these are cases which cause a lot of stress to the operations people. Maintaining data of these situations is also hard, because people keep changing and sheets are forgotten. They can be considered nuances of running business as usual.

Can’t software systems handle it?

Well, they should.
But there are some problems:
– There is either no knowledge of such cases
– The team who wants those changes, cannot express it correctly
– The time taken to implement is very long

What do we do differently at Unity?

When we talk of implementing solutions for educational institutions, we think through all borderline or edge cases. This is because we have multiple decades of experience in implementing systems for educational institutions. Implementing solutions for edge cases is really hard and time taking. Unless the architecture of the code is properly done, it can take anywhere between a few weeks to a few months to accommodate it in to the code.

With low-code/no-code frameworks, this changes dramatically. Edge cases are managed easily and within half the time that is required with normal sofware.

Are there some examples?

Of course. Tons of them. But, we’ll stick to 3:

• Partial fee payments: This is a sore point of all ERPs. Many ERPs give installment provisions, integration with payment gateways, and even custom installments per child. What educational institutions do in such cases:
  • They deny the payment (because they cannot keep track) – which is bad, as the parent will then get marked as a defaulter, and also the educational institution has lost the opportunity to collect fees.
  • Take the payment, but maintain a separate spreadsheet – this is almost as bad as taking the payment, as the person who records this transaction has to then remember each time to refer to this special spreadsheet. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, leading to arguments between parents and the admin team.

We go much further. We know and understand, that parents sometimes want to pay a portion of the due amount of an installment. We even have workflows integrated into this.

• We configure a partial payment for the parent
• We ask for confirming the dates of the remaining amounts – which can be multiple installments too
• We then send an OTP to make the parent commit to these amounts to be paid.

• Mid-term cancellation of admissions: When admissions cancel in the middle of the term just after taking exams, a weird problem arises for exam result. If the child has taken the last exam, we have to give the result to the parents when the results are declared. But the student has been cancelled! How can a cancelled student’s marks be entered? How can a cancelled student’s report card be generated? (If the school’s ERP doesn’t differentiate between cancelled and attending students, that is a much bigger problem!) What educational institutions do in such cases:
  • Manually: They just simply make up a MS-word file, and make the result by hand. That is such a waste of time and resources! Teachers get loaded, have to work extra hours and this leads to an unhappy work environment.

Unity comes to the rescue. We have handled such cases specially, where the system recognizes that there is a cancellation, and takes care of this in the cancellation workflow itself. There is no need to “remember” to do any changes thereafter, as all of it is taken care of by the system. Marks can be entered, results can be processed, while the student strength dashboard is still maintained correctly.

• Tricky notes from parents: Some educational ERPs provide an option to send in an absent note via the parent app (we do too!). And parents do use this feature a lot. But sometimes, even after sending in the absent notes, students insist on coming to school (eg: there is a fun event, or an exam). Parents give in and many times, students attend school anyway. What educational institutions do in such cases:
  • Ignore the notes anyway: 🙂 The teacher marks the attendance on paper, and whoever is in class, is in class. End of story. What is the point of giving this feature in the first place then?
  • Manually change the entries: This is again a pain for the teachers to remember and change in the app.

In Unity, we go a little beyond this. We provide 3 different types of notes:

• Absent notes: These are shown in a different colour when the teacher enters attendance into the system. The teacher’s attendance carries priority over the parent’s note.
• Early pick up notes: Parents sometimes want to pick up their children early, due to sickness or some other family event. In these cases, the admin team which manages transport or the dispersal of students has no idea that the student has been picked up early. This results in considerable stress in locating the person who might know of the early pick up. So, we allow the parents to send in early pick up notes, or let the admin team enter early pick up in the ERP itself. This gets marked for the transport and dispersal teams. This is also shown in a separate colour on the attendance record.
• Late drop notes: Some students come in later than the stipulated time. Many times they miss the bus, and parents have to drop them. In such cases, the transport provider has no idea whether the child has come to school, or is absent. In such cases, we allow the admin team to enter late drops into the ERP. This is shown in a separate colour on the attendance record. This also allows the transport and dispersal team to know that while exiting the premises, they should take that student with them. If not done, this can cause another stressful situation of the student being left behind in the school.

Why go through so much pain?

We truly believe that unless these nuances are taken care of, the product is actually not very usable. If the ERP handles 90% of the cases, the 10% balance causes a lot of stress and manual work. Having decades of experience and being low-code/no-code, we can easily manage all these situations and many more.

Check out our robust set of features, to know more and contact us. Let’s have a conversation over a cup of coffee, where we can show you how you can save money and still have a great software system running your institutions.