“It’s much easier for us to see how changes affect the organisation”

Mid-Sweden University has three campuses, in Härnösand, Sundsvall and Östersund. The entire university has 1,000 employees and a number of agency workers and consultants. The university is one of Sweden’s leading higher education institutions when it comes to distance education. Tomas Berglund is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences and project manager for the introduction of Retendo Academic.

How do you use Retendo Academic?

“We use it in all the parts of the university that work in the areas of education and research. We’re also in the process of setting it up for management and libraries. It’s primarily our workforce planning tool, but we’re also going to get an add-on that provides a higher level of financial follow-up. With the add-on, we get a tool that allows us to see, as early as at the planning stage, whether our allocation of teaching hours on our courses is financially sustainable or needs to be changed.”

Why did you choose Retendo?

“We chose Retendo because it was a tool specifically designed for academic organisations. Before, we had almost as many variants of workforce tools as departments at the university. That made coordination more difficult and meant that the same type of information was entered multiple times in different systems.”

How does it help you be more efficient?

“We can see that it’ll save work in that we’ll achieve integration between our planning systems to enable them to communicate directly with one another. That will eliminate the need for us to enter the same data into several different systems. We’re also in the process of changing our tools for budgets, student planning and personnel management, so several systems are being changed at the same time. Once all the new systems are in place, Retendo’s workforce planning will govern account-coding in the personnel system so that all transfers due to changes in posts are updated automatically. Then it’ll be easier to check accounts during the year and it’ll make our calculations much more accurate.”

What are the three main benefits of Retendo?

“We get a more comparable, stable way of monitoring workforce planning. Also, the scenario feature provides an excellent way of being able to see how a change in financial conditions affects the organisation. It makes it much faster and simpler for us to see how it affects our need for staff. Retendo also provides us with the ability to quickly monitor, at course level and subject level, whether resources are sufficient when we convert kronor to hours.”

How did the introduction process work?

“I think the introduction has gone well so far. It’s a complex process to get 60 people working as planners to adapt and embrace the tool. We get an extremely rapid response as soon as we give the go-ahead for a change or report an error.”

Mid-Sweden University provides unique courses and research of high scientific quality. It has made us into a resource for development and growth.

Employees1,000
Students13,000
Planning units22
Customer since2014