A small college doing serious work, held together by spreadsheets.
Westminster College is a private career college in BC running multiple cohorts across multiple programs. Like most institutions of its size, the operations side of the school was being run out of Excel files, email threads, and the institutional memory of a few key staff.
The pattern is common. The cost is real. When scheduling, compliance, and admin run on spreadsheets, every cycle is a fresh manual rebuild — and every fresh rebuild is an opportunity for an error that nobody catches until a teacher shows up to a session that doesn't exist.
Bi-weekly scheduling was a coordinator's job — for hours.
The college's program coordinator was responsible for building teacher schedules every two weeks. The process looked like this:
Pull each teacher's availability from email and notes
Cross-reference against cohort schedules and module requirements
Manually avoid conflicts (teacher double-booking, room overlaps, prep time)
Build out the schedule in Excel
Send individual notifications to 22 teachers
Field replies, swaps, and corrections — and rebuild whatever broke
Every cycle was a fresh rebuild. Every rebuild took hours. And the coordinator's time — which should have been spent on program quality and student outcomes — was instead spent on a logistical puzzle that didn't need to be solved by a human.
When the coordinator was sick, scheduling stalled.
A multi-tenant scheduling system, built specifically for how Westminster operates.
We built a custom web application — the Teacher Scheduling System (TSCS) — designed around how Westminster actually runs its programs, not how a generic scheduling tool assumes it should.
The system handles:
Automated session generation — schedules build automatically based on cohort requirements, module structures, and teacher availability
Conflict detection — the system blocks double-bookings before they happen, not after
Multi-teacher role support — different teachers carry different roles across modules; the system tracks the full picture
Cohort and module management — cohorts and modules are first-class entities, configurable per program
Automated email notifications — teachers receive their schedules directly, with updates handled by the system
Multi-tenant architecture — built from day one to support multiple institutions, not just Westminster
The build replaced a recurring manual process with a system that runs on its own and gets out of the coordinator's way.
Currently live and in active use.
The system is in production at Westminster College, supporting:
Scheduling that used to take hours every two weeks now takes minutes. The coordinator's time is freed up for the work the role actually exists to do.
Built once. Built right. Built for what comes next.
TSCS was built multi-tenant from the first line of code — not because Westminster needed it, but because we knew Westminster wouldn't be the only college running into this problem.
Most colleges of this size are running scheduling, admissions, and admin the same way: spreadsheets, email, manual coordination, and one or two staff who hold the whole operation in their heads. The Westminster build is the first deployment of a system designed to fit that pattern.
If you run a college that recognizes this picture, the same operational pattern likely applies — and the foundation for solving it is already built.
Want a system like this for your institution?
We're taking on a small number of new projects this year. If your operations look like Westminster's did — schedules, admin, and reporting running on spreadsheets and good intentions — send a message and we'll set up a call.
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