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Smoothest Student Move-in Ever, Thanks to R&DE and UIT

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

More than 10,000 students moved into 108 campus buildings during a four-week period in August and September without a single reported building access incident — the first ever “perfect” housing move-in at the start of a new academic year.

The zero-incident period builds on the success of a system launched in 2016 to automate and simplify building access assignments for students. It was built by the University IT (UIT) Automation and Service Reliability team and the IT team from Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) to make the previous error-prone system faster and more reliable.

The improved system connects the Campus Card System run by UIT with StarRez, R&DE's reservation system.

Software developers from R&DE and UIT created an automated tool that allows the two systems to “talk” to each other to verify that each housing assignment in StarRez matches the building access data in Lenel, Stanford’s access control system. This not only improved accuracy but made the process much more efficient by removing the need for a manual check.

“Instances where access records are out of sync with residency information are now caught and corrected automatically,” said Tim Jad, the R&DE developer. “The integration helped us find and correct issues last year, and improvements this year meant that we didn’t run into any issues to count.”

Registration figures show that the new tool enabled R&DE to seamlessly provide access to rooms even when a peak 4,096 students arrived on September 21, 2017.

Learn more

For more details about the new system, read the 2016 article R&DE and UIT Team Up to Simplify Student Move-Ins and Save Staff Time.

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