29/05/2009 TeQuios Keeps Students Happy The Inisoft development team has reacted quickly to late changes to the rules governing the application of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). The changes have been made available to all Further Education Colleges in Scotland using TeQuios to manage allocation and distribution of funds to attending students. EMA is key component of the Scottish Government’s objective to encourage access to, and participation in further and higher education by young people from low-income families. Each EMA award is governed by a comprehensive set of business rules and award criteria, with each college required to manage and administer the delivery of EMA awards within its own student population. “It’s not unusual for the rules governing the application of EMA to change and the system is designed to accommodate these”, comments Chris Oggelsby, Inisoft Business Development Manager, “In this case, the changes arrived very late in the year with a need to codify and roll these out in unprecedented timescales. However, this was comfortably accommodated within our development process which is structured to support very rapid development in appropriate cases without compromise to product or service quality. I’m delighted that we were able to demonstrate this to the user community”. TeQuios is used by over 50% of the Scottish FE colleges to manage the allocation of EMA awards and bursaries to the students. It is essential that all policy changes are incorporated into TeQuios as soon as possible to ensure all awards are accurately calculated and meet the published criteria. Inisoft works in close collaboration with its users both directly and through an active TeQuios User group. Background TeQuios is a product of Inisoft Ltd which has been producing high quality software products for over 19 years. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Inisoft is a part of the Murray International Holdings group of companies, a widely-based private group with annual sales of over £540m (c$850m). TeQuios was developed in response to the requirement from a number of the Scottish Further Education Colleges for a system that simplified the allocation and management of the variety of bursary and hardship funds that had to be administered. It was launched ahead of plan and to budget in 2004.