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TourKey Performance Indicators
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Covalent fully caters for the very specific needs of FE Colleges to demonstrate how they have been performing relative to priorities.
Covalent provides a powerful self-assessment tool for the Common Inspection Framework, the Training Quality Standard and the Framework for Excellence. It also tracks progress on key actions plans such as Self-Assessment Reports (SARs), post-inspection Action Plans and Quality Improvement Plans.
Strategic and Development Plans can be mapped to the CIF and Every Child Matters criteria, and to external accreditation standards such as OFSTED.
Covalent Scorecards allow you to track performance results in each school, on a course-by-course basis, by consolidating data from various MIS systems in one place.
- Manage inspections better to achieve tight compliance on the CIF assessments, and to ensure constant readiness for a short notice inspection. Conduct scored self assessments and consolidate the necessary supporting evidence to meets inspectors requirements.
- Powerful Performance Reporting on statutory Performance Indicators as well as any local operational indicators you may use to drive performance improvements.
- Comprehensive Risk Management with strategic and operational risk registers consolidated in one place and scored on an Impact/ Likelihood matrix.
- Align performance information with the college's strategy to monitor progress towards achievement of corporate aims, priorities and operational objectives.
KPIs
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Covalent gives you an easy, visually engaging way of monitoring the Key Performance Indicators that tell you how you're doing.
Covalent manages all the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you have defined as critical performance drivers of your strategy's success. Each KPI is mapped to one (or more) strategic and operational objective. As results are recorded against target performance levels for each time period, the KPI gauges are traffic-lighted so you can quickly identify any problem areas. With one click you can drill down to more information, assign a corrective action or run an exception report.
Covalent streamlines the process of measuring and tracking Performance Indicators, saving huge amounts of time on data gathering, analysis, manipulation and reporting. The system is preloaded with a full library of statutory and housing industry PIs and you can also add as many of your own local PIs as you want.
- Focus on the measures that need attention. Gauges, graphs, traffic-lighting and trend icons will bring your data to life, making it understandable 'at-a-glance' so you can quickly zoom into the problem areas (if any!).
- Make more informed decisions with the full picture. Touch-of-a-button status updates, on screen or on printed reports, quickly show all you need to know.
- Proactively manage performance to take action where needed. Covalent constantly tracks performance against targets and emails you alerts when things change that you need to know about.
Covalent GPM (Geographic Performance Maps) allows you to examine performance data on a geographic basis. It takes data results for PIs set up in Covalent and displays them in a map layer corresponding to the organisation's boundaries. Covalent's unique approach, using SVG files, means you don't even need to have GIS software to use this module.
Actions
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Covalent Actions consolidates all your action and improvement plans in one place, giving you powerful progress tracking facilities.
Covalent Actions consolidates all the organisation's action plans and projects in one place. It gives you powerful progress tracking facilities, and the ability to easily look at project from multiple perspectives - by owner, by status, by corporate priority. In fact, the more customers use Action Central, the more uses they find for it - improvement plans, inspection recommendations, staff appraisal tasks, service & corporate plans.
You'll be able to pick out overdue actions or missed milestones at-a-glance, as action plans are traffic-lighted based on progress and deadline date. As actions are progressed, users can enter status update commentaries so providing ongoing communication and feedback.
- Provides senior management with clear visibility of progress on major initiatives to ensure that when plans go off-track timely corrective action can be taken.
- Proactively manage against deadlines. Put an end to chasing people for action status updates by phone or personal email and save massive effort and time.
- Track progress of your projects portfolio. You'll be able to easily compare status and identify overlapping dates with Covalent's calendar-view, which shows progress for all your projects on traffic-lighted horizontal bars.
- Dramatically simplify projects reporting. You'll get reporting that's flexible enough to meet modern demands - different audiences looking at the same projects information in various combinations; by owner, by status, by date, by strategy.
Self Assessments
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You can use Covalent to conduct self-assessments & manage all aspects of the inspections process.
Covalent is pre-loaded with the CIF framework (Framework for Excellence thr new standard) and a host of generic frameworks, including Customer Service Excellence: The Government Standard, Investors in People (IIP), Equality Standard, Investors in Diversity (IiD) etc.
- Take action where you need to, whilst there's still time. Well in advance of the actual inspection, Covalent will alert you to any problem areas that may impact on your ultimate score. Covalent gives you a traffic-lighted view of the entire model and each KLOE, highlighting at-a-glance those lower scoring criteria (red or amber) that merit further attention.
- Make sure you're complying with the statutory framework. As they work through a self-assessment, staff will have one-click access to guidance notes to direct them towards an appropriate score, based on what inspectors are looking for.
- Simplify the consolidation of supporting evidence by attaching relevant files and working papers to each KLOE. Action plans, managed elsewhere in Covalent, can be linked to individual KLOEs and questions in the assessment.
- Ensure a consistent approach across the organisation. Now you can be sure everyone will complete the regulatory assessments in the right way, with Covalent presenting questions in an easy-to-access, structured format, in line with the published guidance.
Risks
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Covalent consolidates all risk registers in one place, visually displaying the risk score on a colour coded matrix.
Covalent Risks gets your staff actually managing risks by progressing mitigation actions and adjusting internal controls. It offers a superior way to manage risks, replacing inflexible spreadsheets and Word documents. Instead, information is maintained centrally and risks that should be getting the most attention are easily identifiable.
- Get everyone using a consistent scoring method. Staff will understand the process better and will have a tool to bring risk management into their day-to-day work. Covalent's two dimensional matrix mapping Likelihood of risk occurrence and risk Impact means you'll be able to compare risk profiles across the organisation.
- Identify the issues at-a-glance. Your risk registers will come to life with traffic-lighting and exception reporting focusing people's attention on areas of concern. Everyone will have immediate one-click access to risks they're responsible for, with exception reporting to highlight risks' status.
- Monitor effectiveness of Internal Controls. You'll be able to assess the internal controls that have been put in place with supporting information (such as risk profile, risk factors, assessment record or potential effect) just one-click away.
- Proactively manage risks, with regular reassessments. Put an end to chasing people for updates by phone or personal email and save massive effort and time. Covalent constantly tracks against due dates and emails staff reminders when a risk is due for re-assessment, or alerts when things change that they need to know about.
Feedback
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Consolidate all your customer feedback for easy tracking against resolution deadlines, in line with your own procedures.
Covalent Feedback helps boost customer confidence and overall performance by offering a centralised method of storing, progressing and resolving customer issues.
Covalent Feedback centralises and structures the management of Complaints, Compliments, Freedom of Information requests, CCfAs and other forms of customer interaction.
You can set up different stages to allow you to progress the complaint through your normal workflow process and assign actions to each complaint to remedy the problem.
- Traffic-lighting quickly highlights the status of all feedback relative to target resolution date. Tracked progress through each escalation stage, corresponding to your own specific procedures and processes.
- Simple dropdown lists ensure the right information is recorded against the complaint. These are configurable and can comprise Complaint type, Complaint Source, Complaint Remedy, Complainant Type and Complainant Ethnicity.
- Set up default options for remedy types. If a specific action can be taken to remedy a complaint, for example removing refuse that had not been collected or a review/change to the processes of the organisation, a specific default action can be allocated, complete with due dates and subsequent actions.
- Powerful reporting that's simple to use. Covalent is supplied with a library of pre-defined report templates that cover most requirements. Customer-specific reports can be created using Covalent's built-in reporting tool, using an easy point & click approach.
Scorecards
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Covalent Scorecards allow you to view performance data in a range of visually engaging, meaningful and intuitive ways.
Scorecards visually represent the organisation's strategies and map PIs, actions and risks at each level in a hierarchical tree.
- Scorecards highlight interdependencies between activities with drill-down to the underlying data for further investigation.
- The 'Panic' overlay button provides a traffic lighted view of current status for each element in the scorecard, with scores aggregated up to indicate status with 'softer' perspectives like corporate priorities and objectives. Status of a higher level perspective is highlighted with a 'rider' red-flag if performance of a sub-element is at red
- Scorecards can be built at multiple levels in the organisation and can be used to view the same information from different perspectives.
Performance Snapshots provide a high level summary of all key data for PIs, Actions and Risks of specific interest to a specific user or department.
- Summary information is provided on current status with each performance element, as well as recent results. On the right, exception reporting highlights any linked elements that are also at 'red' (i.e. off target).
- Typical Snapshots would be PIs/actions/risks by organisational unit, service area, corporate priority, strategy theme etc. Whilst there may be hundreds of Snapshots on the system, each user will typically have just a small number that they have been given visibility of, to minimise data overload.
- Users have one-click access for drill down to the supporting details to interrogate all aspects of corporate or departmental performance.
Web Publishing
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Powerful, configurable performance reporting and automatic publishing to the web.
Covalent Reports contains a vast library of predefined templates, and an ad-hoc report generation tool to custom build new reports.
Report Dossiers allow you to combine a range of individual reports in a sequenced whole mixing report types such as Actions, KPIs and Risks. Additionally, you can incorporate any non-Covalent report document into the Dossier - such as an image file, or a Word/Excel file - and print that in one go with the Covalent reports.
- Multiple formats supported. Reports can be viewed online, distributed electronically to colleagues, exported into other desktop systems or printed in hard copy. Output formats supported are XML, HTML, PDF, Rich Text and CSV format. Using these formats, data can be exported into predefined templates (such as those required for statutory returns) or can be exported to other applications like Microsoft Excel or Word for further data manipulation if required.
- Simple report creation and generation, with no coding or third party tools required. Wizards guide users through the process of creating customised reports from templates using a parameter driven, point-and-click approach, whereby users select from drop down lists what query they want to run and what they want to show on the report.
- Total control over colour, fonts and report layout. You use drag & drop to add things to the report layout or move them around to reposition on the page. You can also specify what profile information is included such as organisation logo, header, pagination and various other elements.
What some of our customers are saying...
We bought Covalent to draw together a myriad of action plans, and to enhance the efficiency with which these can be monitored and analysed. We believe this will drive quality forward and at the same time make self assessment and strategic planning more refined.
Gloucestershire College
Covalent is a very practical and sensible system that allows us to monitor, predict and report on key aspects of college performance. It enables staff at all levels to monitor retention, achievement and success in a very easy and user friendly way. Covalent also makes the tracking and reporting of risk assessment simple.
Braintree College
Before Covalent, our PM system was a standalone MS Access database which was effective but not as interactive. Covalent have been extremely helpful in helping the College (with financial support from our local LSC) to pull together in one location the whole range of action plans, risk registers and performance indicators that we currently have spread across the institution. It will enable us very simply to map all of these to the Strategic and Development Plans, to the Common Inspection Framework and Every Child Matters criteria, and to external accreditation standards, and to attach evidence sources to them. The traffic light system for monitoring progress against targets is a very useful tool, and the reporting structure should make pulling together the evidence for the Self Assessment Report a much speedier process.
Otley College
In the drive to become an excellent institution and to prepare itself for the introduction of 'Framework for Excellence', Walford and North Shropshire College was looking for an IT system to monitor the completion of actions arising from Self-Assessment and to track outcomes against key performance indicators. Covalent Software provided the solution and is to be used across the College's campuses as part of a new quality assurance system.
Walford & North Shropshire College
