Collision manager: never double-book a room or professor, ever again

The schedule has been produced. The schedule has been approved. The schedule has been published. You are breathing freely for the first time in many months.

Just as you turn your chair to begin your next (of eleven) tasks, someone appears in your doorway and says, "about the schedule, we were wondering if we could make a slight change."

Your chest constricts.

It tightened because you know you are about to be asked to cut into a perfectly healthy body.

For the first time in the hundreds of years that course schedules have been being made, help has crested the hill--The Collision Manager to the rescue. This is hands down, year after year, starting about five minutes after it was developed, our clients' unanimously favorite feature.

If you're curious how much people love it, we had one school subscribe to our full service, just to have the Collision Manager. They didn't use our preference engine. They didn't use our scheduling algorithm. They still hand-rolled their schedule. And once they made it, they hand-entered it into our system treating every class like a Registrar-set override. Then they used our system to backstop ALL of their post-production changes they were asked to make over the next seven months. Why? They were tired of explaining why rooms and professors kept getting double-booked. It was simply an embarrassment they didn't want to shoulder anymore.

How it works. You will build and publish your schedule as normal. Then when asked to change the schedule, whether to add courses, change rooms, flip days, replace professors, whatever the modification may be, you will enter those changes as normal into our system. But now, instead of fretting and worrying and stressing about if you just wrecked something, you will push the button that says CHECK FOR COLLISIONS and sit back while the Collision Manager checks your work. When the audit is complete, you will either get the all clear or a notification that conflicts exist. AND more importantly, when there are conflicts you are told what they were and where they are.

When the next change comes in, and we all know it will, rinse, wash, repeat.

Do you feel that? It is the feeling of your body taking in normal breaths of air! It's such a lovely feeling.

Now, are you still wondering why a school would pay just for this single feature or why it is perennially the most beloved feature?

As always, see you on the scheduling pitch.

Troy.

Troy Dearmitt

Troy is the CTO & Co-founder at ofCourse.

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