Client Challenge

North Yarmouth Academy was dealing with a textbook program that consumed too much time and too many resources. In addition to the ordering, billing, and distributing of textbooks, the responsibility of managing multiple publisher relationships had become a huge burden on the staff. Gathering updated adoption information from faculty each year required copious amounts of paperwork and data entry. As Lisa Robbins, Director of Yarmouth's textbook program stated, "Our textbook operation was such a cumbersome process with so many people involved. It was just incredibly labor intensive." Continual changes in the program, however, did not succeed in developing an efficient and stress-free system. "We needed to get out of the book business. That's not our business, we’re a school," said Robbins. Yarmouth needed a solution that would allow time to be allocated to school needs, not textbook issues.

Solution

MBS Direct teamed with North Yarmouth to create an online solution that eases the burdens of textbook management for faculty, while delivering the utmost in convenience to parents and students. Parents simply order textbooks from the school's online bookstore and have them shipped directly to their homes, eliminating the need for North Yarmouth to house inventory on campus, thus reducing the cumbersome tasks that accompany on-site textbook programs. In addition, Yarmouth's adoption process has been simplified with MBS Direct's online adoption management tool, Course Director, which allows faculty to easily update course adoptions, while administrators approve and submit the final booklist, all of which is done online. "With MBS Direct I simply act as an administrator, and can allocate my time in ways that are more productive for the school," said Robbins. By eliminating the need to manage an on-site textbook program, the staff at North Yarmouth can now focus on education, not on textbook fulfillment.

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