With the participation of Ford Motor Company, the £50 million Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence (www.ceme.co.uk) in Dagenham, East London, is widely seen as the most exciting new learning environment ever to reach the bricks and mortar stage.

The CEME project, part of the Thames Gateway regeneration effort, the largest in Europe, is a high-profile joint venture involving government, academia and business. Along with Ford, funding is provided by the London Development Agency and the DTI. The first facility, the Business Innovation Centre (BIC), was opened last December by Alan Johnson MP, then Minister of State for Employment Relations, Industry and the Regions.

When completed, CEME will host institutes of basic skills and higher learning, as well as state of the art “business incubator units”. While the centre will be run on a non-profit basis, the partners hope to generate sufficient surplus to reinvest for future growth.

According to Roy Sharples, seconded by Ford to head up CEME’s IT strategy, the centre will provide a totally new web-based learning environment. “Thiscountry needs advanced skills so we are using portal-based technology to provide a blend of new ways to learn engineering. We want to use IT to enhance learning delivery in a cost-effective way.” For Roy, “excellence” means “best of class” and his IT partners include Microsoft, IBM and Cisco. To schedule and forecast facilities and resources use on the enormous campus, he selected Rendezvous, the browser-based next generation conference software from NFS Hospitality.

“We needed a totally multi-purpose scheduling system,” Roy says. “So we looked for the best available system that could enable us to plan and manage our business operation by helping schedule facilities and resources.” After a full product assessment, Roy’s team decided that Rendezvous “met our short to mid term functional requirements as well as our architectural needs.”

As Phase One alone covers 160,000 sq. ft. and comprises a huge technical workshop, 14 heavy duty training rooms, 22 classrooms, four CADCAM rooms, as well as an e-enabled learning resource centre and a 350-capacity conference facility, Rendezvous is used to ensure that every seat in every room is properly allocated and equipped.

“We need to be able to configure room use and plan how many PCs need to be reconfigured or networked for each meeting,” Roy explains. “We will also use the system to plan e-mail account access and A/V – whatever is needed.”

In Phase One, nearby Barking & Havering College will provide basic skills content and accreditation, while Warwick and Loughborough universities will deliver Phase Two, the higher education phase. Phase Two, due to go live this autumn, includes its own business school research centre.

At present, 1,500 people use Rendezvous for on-line enquiries with four having full access. While the complex campus presents a huge scheduling challenge, especially with the opening of Phase Two, Roy says that Rendezvous is proving its worth. “We aim to gain quick returns from early development efforts and to drive constant year to year operational productivity improvements.”