Meeting Minutes

Team name : Bookstore Recorder : Carrie Wright Meeting Date, Time, Location : June 9, 2004 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Admin 226 Present: Chris Black, Peg Laughlin, Lynn Howe, Carrie Wright

Absent: Ken Vandermark

Resource People Present:

Guests:

Decisions:

To Do’s & deadlines:

Chris – Talk with Les regarding voucher process Deadline: By next meeting

Chris – Draft general introduction for report as well as agreement piece of report between VTC and Follett Deadline: E-mail to Carrie by June 22 4 p.m.

Chris – Find out how our final information is to be presented – PowerPoint? Deadline: By next meeting – June 23

Chris – Call Joey Caron, can he meet with us at 1:30 on June 23 to discuss customer service issues Deadline: ASAP

Chris – E-mail Joey regarding financial aid on-line piece, i.e., having to use the credit card box for credit card information if the amount exceeds voucher, etc. Deadline: By next meeting – June 23

Carrie – Draft report write-up for apprenticeship and tech centers Deadline: By next meeting – have on disk at meeting

Carrie – Ask Apprenticeship Site Coordinators to poll students on first nights of classes regarding on-line book buying experience Deadline: September. Have information ready for September meeting

4/4/2018 p. 1 Peg: Draft report write-up for nursing Deadline: E-mail to Carrie by June 22 4 p.m.

Peg: Ask Nursing students during first week of classes about on-line book buying experience Deadline: September. Have information ready for September meeting

Lynn: Draft report write-up for instructors, i.e., importance of textbook adoption forms, how information ties into buyback, new editions, etc. Deadline: E-mail to Carrie by June 22 4 p.m.

Date, Time, Location of Next Meeting: Wednesday, June 23 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. – Admin 226

Summary of Topics Discussed:

Minutes from May 19 and June 1 were approved.

A quick review of Follett meeting took place. Carrie indicated that she left the meeting feeling much better about the process.

Peg mentioned that she left the meeting feeling good but feels we will need to continue to make our needs known. She still felt discouraged that Follett didn’t give them the on-line option years earlier, etc. She indicated that in the past they have worked real hard to make the Bookstore happy but realizes that that the Bookstore has made life very difficult and the fact is that we (VTC) are the customer. In all fairness they need to have a chance, and we are very forgiving.

Lynn mentioned that having Joey at the meeting and telling Peg that if she had any issues to contact him directly was a good thing.

Chris mentioned that the Bookstore Advisory Committee we discussed in previous meetings should be formed and that committee would be the liaison for the campus – changes, needs, etc. Carrie asked if our CQI team would recommended who should be on the committee. Chris indicated that we could recommend anything we want. Carrie indicated that it would be beneficial if the members of the committee were not only those physically located in Randolph Center. Members should come from all across the board – Blair Park, Tech Extension, Randolph Center, faculty reps, etc, student reps, etc.

Chris mentioned that our job is not to be an interpreter but to make the recommendations and to point out that the communication in the past has not been good, etc.

Carrie mentioned that she has not heard back from Brent regarding textbook adoption forms for Blair for fall and that it may take someone else following up with Brent to discuss this. 4/4/2018 p. 2 Peg mentioned that she met with nursing students last week and the students are thrilled to be able to begin ordering their books now.

Review of June 1 minutes:

Nursing – for the future we are asking Follett to have books ready by May 1. We understand there won’t be many used books due to early availability date we are requesting.

Chris asked Peg what was decided on for Math for Meds textbook. Peg indicated it is still up in the air, the big group is meeting tomorrow, June 10, to make the final decision. Sometimes you can’t get the old version if a new version is coming out, etc.

Carrie mentioned that sometimes the new version is available online, ie., Amazon, before the publisher gets it to the Bookstore, etc.

Chris asked what we want to do about new version of books that may/may not be available. Should we recommend something along the lines of although a preview copy may be available, the actual text for students may not be available, so be wary of going to a new edition. Lynn mentioned that every 2-4 years the publishers are going to go into a new edition. Chris indicated that we would want to recommend that faculty previewing a new edition should be wary of changing to the new edition because it may not be available. Carrie wondered if a date could be stuck in there, i.e., by May 15 if book not available go with older version for fall. Chris indicated that we are just making the recommendation and the faculty will ultimately decide what version to go with, the communication lines just need to be there, i.e., let the faculty member know that in the past there have been instances when the book wasn’t available, etc. Chris mentioned that if a preview copy is in the faculty hand there is a good chance the text will be available on time. If the instructor has a real, printed preview edition in May they probably can be real comfortable that the books is available. If they only have copies of chapters to look at the instructor should be wary. This is worth addressing in our final report. We should add a page in our report for faculty regarding things we’ve learned along the way.

Lynn did mention that sometimes instructors can get copyright permission to copy the first chapter or so of their preview book, etc. For books out of print, the Bookstore has a separate company they deal with to get out of print books, copies, etc. This was new and good information for us.

Lynn asked Peg if she would be telling her students to order their books through e-follett or would they go to the Bookstore on Orientation Day to purchase books? Peg indicated they will be using both systems for this go around. There will be no specific block of time on Orientation Day designated for book buying however.

4/4/2018 p. 3 Carrie mentioned that she brought this topic up with the Apprenticeship Site Coordinators and DET Representatives last Friday as well. The decision was that we would ask the Bookstore to be open for three hours for the last minute registered participants and that’s it. We want to be sensitive to the Boosktore employees also and their time, etc. Carrie also indicated she outlined how we would handle Purchase Orders and the 2002 NEC. We would not accept any Purchase Orders and the Bookstore will only order 50-100 2002 NEC books. All Most apprentices already have the book or they have easy access to the book at a cheaper price. All in attendance at the meeting were very excited about the new process and see that is a major step forward.

Chris mentioned that we are already seeing improvements!

Regarding Financial Aid and ordering on-line, Chris mentioned that if a student has a financial aid voucher of $250 and the bill comes to $300, the student will need the credit card box to enter a credit card number. Joey had indicated in our previous meeting that we could put a “dummy” number in that box to flag it as financial aid. Chris will e-mail Joey on this. Carrie mentioned that perhaps they could put the “dummy” number in the comments section along with their student id.

Adoption forms – we realize that we need separate forms for Blair and Randolph Center.

Chris mentioned that we really have come to conclusions about most of the issues we came up with. The buyback site locations is one area that still needs to be worked on but most of the other items we know how we are going to recommend on or how the process/system will work.

Flow chart –

Discussion on changes the flow chart. We need to put a statement in our report about why the timeliness and adoption forms are import, new editions, buybacks, etc.

We discussed scheduling and the fact that if it could be done by a certain date we could have students come to campus to purchase books early, etc. It would be a nice service to provide to our customers, who are our students, one that says “yes, come on in we’d love to see you”.

We appear to have worked out a solution to the student order and shipping issue. Once we test the solution we’ll change the blue to a green.

We appear to have worked on many of the issues surrounding the nursing program.

Apprenticeship – all of the items appear to be addressed. 4/4/2018 p. 4 Tech Centers – items identified appear to be addressed.

Companies – how does the book process work? Chris/Lynn mentioned that the textbook charges get put into the inventory account. We aren’t marking up the books, we are just passing it through. Chris mentioned that we may want to make the company order the books, have the books shipped directly to the company, etc. Avoiding the pass through would work well for the business end of things for VTC. This is an open item still.

Chris mentioned that we need to wrap up the implementation and that perhaps we need to meet again at the end of September to do the “Check” stage. Carrie will ask the site coordinators to poll students the first nights of class, etc. If the same complaint comes out of many different classes, etc we will then know what needs to be addressed, etc. Carrie mentioned that the apprenticeship group is a very difficult one to get paper surveys from, thus the polling decision.

Peg will hear about complaints, etc. if there are any. She will poll the students the first week of class to get feedback. Peg did bring up a good point, the first year students wouldn’t even know what the previous problems/system was so there shouldn’t be much issue from them. Chris mentioned that any feedback we could get from administration/faculty would be great also. It will tell us what needs to be tweaked also in order to make things better.

Lynn mentioned that we should also get feedback from the Bookstore.

Tree Diagram –

We appear to have evaluated the root causes. The implementation will really be getting a draft of the report that goes to Cabinet, i.e., a preliminary report on the first two stages. At least one page of the report will be dedicated to faculty on things we’ve learned, what to be wary of, etc. Another page will contain a statement of understanding, i.e., what we understand Follett to have indicated they will do for us and what VTC will do for Follett. This will begin to provide a clear understanding and opening of communication lines.

Our next stage as a team is to begin drafting some of these items. It really isn’t anything that we can do in a group.

Chris asked Carrie to address apprenticeship and tech centers. Provide an intro paragraph on how it was done in the past, what the problems were/why it didn’t work, etc. and then the proposed solutions we’ve come up with that we are putting into place.

Carrie will try to speak with Dick Flies about the current process Tech Extension uses for “company” ordering, etc. Why does Tech Extension order the books and have all of the charges just “pass through the books, etc”. It would be much 4/4/2018 p. 5 easier for the company rep and/or Gae to go on-line, purchase the books, print the invoice, have the company send a check and then have the Bookstore shipped the books directly to the company.

Peg will address nursing and the solutions we’ve come up with.

Lynn will take a stab at the yellow box on the flow chart. Why the adoption forms are important, how it ties into the buybacks, new editions, etc. She will work on it as a one pager as information to the faculty using bullets.

Chris will take a stab at drafting a general introduction.

Chris will also ask how this projects results are going to be presented..reports, PowerPoint, etc?

Chris will also take a stab at the agreement with Follett piece for the report.

Lynn asked how detailed we should be. For the faculty we should do bullets. For apprenticeship, nursing, etc we should be detailed.

For the next meeting we all have assignments. Carrie indicated that if everyone will e-mail her their specific drafts, she will save them on a disk and bring copies of the entire document to the next meeting for us to work on.

At our June 23 meeting we’d like to walk away with a preliminary draft.

Chris mentioned that we still do need to address the customer service issues with Joey, alone. Peg mentioned that it is important to keep Joey in the loop because the Bookstore may not provide the feedback to Joey that we may want, etc.

We discussed asking Joey to attend the June 23 meeting at 1:30. Chris will contact him to see if this is possible.

The team discussed the necessity for another meeting date. It was decided that we would just extend our June 23 meeting to an “all-day” session so that we could work productively on the drafts we are preparing in order to have a fairly final document to present.

Agenda Items for 6-23-04 meeting:

Review and approve June 9 meeting minutes. Review draft assignments and make revisions to report. Potential meeting with Joey Caron regarding customer service issues.

Parking Lot (beyond next meeting):

4/4/2018 p. 6