Background
Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) is Ireland’s national awarding authority for further and higher education grants, providing financial support to eligible students across the country. Processing thousands of grant applications each year, SUSI relies on accurate address data to deliver an efficient service and ensure students receive timely support. By integrating Autoaddress and Eircodes into its application process, SUSI was able to improve address accuracy, streamline operations, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Success
During the recent Eircode Success Stories Conference, Paul Spring, ICT Manager at Student Universal Support Ireland, reviewed the results of Eircode and Autoaddress implementation, finding that it helped them save time and provide a better service.
Eircodes have saved SUSI 2,666 hours in the last six months. Paul also noted that the implementation process was simple. Linking Autoaddress to Google maps has allowed SUSI to automate a previously time-intensive manual process and to improve customer service and internal efficiencies.
The benefits to date have been amazing, including:
- Accuracy (of address/location)
- Removal of data-entry errors
- Consistency in application of the scheme
- Increased automation
- Time-saving: 2666 hours saved in six months
In its fifth year of operation, SUSI (Student Universal Support Ireland), a government initiative replacing 66 grant-awarding authorities, is being praised for its improved performance.
SUSI has already received more than 105,000 applications this year and will award in the region of €370 million in grants this year. In order to meet the challenges posed by such numbers, SUSI introduced a number of improvements, including the implementation of Eircodes and Autoaddress.
SUSI is using the Eircode, Autoaddress and Google Maps integrations to determine how far students live from their college, and these automatically calculate the distance for each applicant.
The student begins to type their Eircode or address and the Autoaddress auto-complete API presents matching addresses. The full address then appears in the form and the exact location information of the Eircode is used by SUSI to automatically calculate the applicant’s distance from the college which they plan to attend, which is used to determine the payment rate for those who qualify for a grant.
In previous years SUSI assessors had to manually check the distance on Google Maps. According to SUSI’s Graham Doyle:
“The use of Eircode has enabled us to programme our systems and the calculated distance now comes in from the application form and removes the need for manual intervention.”
