By Adnan Rafique
ISLAMABAD: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) via its Higher Education Development Programme in Pakistan (HEDP) held a contract signing ceremony where key personnel and leadership of HEC and Tally Marks Consulting (TMC) were present.
The signing ceremony represents a significant milestone for Pakistan’s higher education sector. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) receiving state-of-the-art Student Lifecycle Systems (SLC) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will completely digitise their administrative, accounting, operations, and end-to-end student lifecycle processes from admission to degree completion.
All the leading universities of the world have already adopted these systems and this activity marks HEC’s commitment as well as investment to implement the same in Pakistani HEIs. The systems enhance efficiency, and transparency and promptly provide key higher education data for decision making.
At the signing ceremony Chairman HEC Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, Executive Director HEC Dr Zia Ul-Qayyum, MD TMC Abdul Haseeb, and Partner Director SAP Amir Shah were present among other senior officials of HEC, HEDP, TMC and SAP.
Speaking at the occasion, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed said, “We are now one team and it’s a great collaboration that will increase the quality of education for all in Pakistan. There are 260 plus HEIs in line to be digitized and this signing ceremony is the starting point of a fully digitized education system in Pakistan. Collaboration and commitment of HEIs, however, remain highly important since this is a seed and will start the process to inspire other HEIs of Pakistan.” Dr Zia Ul-Qayyum reinforced that the private sector should not treat education as a high-profit business but as a part of their social responsibility to serve the nation.
MD TMC informed that SAP leadership is committed to equipping young Pakistanis with the latest tools and technologies. They have already trained more than 2000 students and professionals in Pakistan free of cost as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility activities.
The joint effort of HEC and SAP is a landmark achievement as it represents the foundation stone of a fully paperless higher education infrastructure across the country.
HEC’s strategic IT initiatives further include developing robust high-end Data Centers, High-Performance Computing and Pakistan higher education’s own indigenous local and secure cloud infrastructure, MOOCs platform for global lifelong learning and specialised Learning Management Systems that are already in progress at different stages of completion.
HEC is an autonomous and constitutionally established institution of funding, overseeing, regulating, and accrediting the higher education efforts in Pakistan. HEDP is a flagship project of HEC supporting it in its strategic areas of research, governance, capacity building policy-making and a wide variety of IT initiatives for the higher education sector.
TMC specializes in SAP (ERP System Business Software Solutions) in addition to several other leading technologies and is the largest SAP partner(principal) in Pakistan. With hundreds of clients globally, TMC has a proven track record of delivering innovative and effective solutions for various leading Public and private sector organizations in Pakistan.
