Two institutions with a knack for cultivating home-grown talent through elevating existing team members and hiring recent graduates won the 8th annual Tambellini Technology Leadership Awards.

The Enterprise CRM team at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, led by Mary Beaver, Director of Enterprise Software Systems, earned the Innovative Team Award.

As director of MCCC’s Enterprise Software Systems, Mary Beaver faced a dilemma common among leaders charged with evaluating CRM options: should her team buy a ready-made platform or build their own?

While spending on the former would be the easier solution, Beaver and two members of her six-person team (four of whom are MCCC alumni) decided to take the more ambitious route and build a customized system using the Microsoft Dynamics platform to serve their community’s unique needs.

“It was such a huge undertaking, and sometimes we felt really alone on this journey because we didn’t have a lot of peers who took on a project of this magnitude,” said Beaver.

“I am so very proud of our CRM team, which includes two MCCC alumni, Marwa Dwidar and Andrew Rosner. Winning this award validates their commitment and success in making the student experience better every day.”

Rosner, who is the lead software developer, is a graduate of MCCC and a former student worker in the IT Department. Dwidar, CRM Systems Specialist, is a 2021 graduate of MCCC. As a student, she was an active member of the IT Department’s Women in Science and Technology (WIST) group.

The other members of Beaver’s overall team include Nina Xu, Robert Vogel, Kimberly Liberty, and Julio Ashrafzadeh.

MCCC’s IT Department is led by Dr. Celeste Schwartz, Vice President of Information Technology & Institutional Effectiveness. Schwartz also is a MCCC alumna and has worked at the College for more than 50 years.

Before building their own CRM system, attempts to manage student support inquiries through shared email inboxes spread over various departments had been inefficient, frustrating, and nearly impossible to track. The pandemic compounded this challenge, along with issues related to coordinating institutional communications with students.

Beaver’s team has dramatically improved student case management and automated communications, even meeting their stretch goals ahead of their deadline.

Read more about the awardees and their accomplishments on the Montgomery County Community College website.

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