Emory University Boosts End-User Productivity With WebFOCUS
Snapshot
| Organization Founded in 1836, Emory University has 11,300 students and 2,500 faculty members from all regions of the United States and more than 100 foreign nations. |
| The Challenge Improve access to financial information for departmental users responsible for making budgets and tracking expenses. |
| The Strategy Create an end-user reporting environment that allows financial professionals throughout the university to access current information in a usable format. |
| The Results WebFOCUS extends data access capabilities for hundreds of authorized users, eliminates calls to the help desk, frees up the IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and improves financial accountability. |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, FOCUS for Mainframe. |
A Lesson in Financial Reporting
Information technology (IT) professionals working in the university environment face a unique set of challenges. As nonprofit organizations with limited operating budgets, universities must deliver economical IT solutions that are easy to maintain. Yet as institutions of higher learning, their IT services should exemplify technical sophistication and academic excellence. Delivering cutting-edge technology in a cost-effective way is an ongoing challenge. That's why IT professionals at Emory University are using WebFOCUS from Information Builders to automate a wide variety of financial reporting activities.
"We wanted a self-service reporting system that would give financial users easy access to the information they need, when they need it, in a format that is useful to each individual," explains Mark Hafitz, a business analyst in the finance division at Emory University. "WebFOCUS gives hundreds of users throughout the university the freedom to create their own reports and queries in a very productive and efficient way."
With more than 20,000 employees on payroll and an annual operating budget of over $1.8 billion, Emory University has a pressing need for financial information. Until WebFOCUS came on the scene, however, business analysts and accountants were stymied by limited access to crucial financial data. In order to generate custom reports, IT pros had to write COBOL programs or develop EASYTRIEVE procedures, which was cumbersome and did not always deliver the results these users were expecting.
"Anybody tracking expenses or trying to reconcile a budget either had to wait until the end of the month to receive their general ledger statements, or submit a special report-request to the finance department," says Hafitz. "The standard GL reports were very general, which meant users often had to manually extract the information they were looking for and rekey it into spreadsheets for further analysis. Over time, this situation led to many different 'shadow systems' that were being used by various departments and users, which was difficult to monitor or control."
Developing a New Curriculum
Hafitz and about 60 other financial professionals at the university support the information technology requirements of numerous financial domains, including payroll, accounts payable, general ledger, billables, receivables, grants, and contracts. It's an immense responsibility: Emory University is home to nine major academic divisions, numerous centers for advanced study, and a host of prestigious affiliated institutions. In addition to Emory College, the university encompasses a graduate school of arts and sciences; professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, public health, and business; and Oxford College, a two-year undergraduate division on the original campus of Emory in Oxford, Georgia. Emory Healthcare and its affiliates also use the finance division applications.
Hafitz and his team are always on the lookout for ways to streamline the operation. In 1990, Emory purchased FOCUS for Mainframe, allowing programmers to more easily customized reports. This was a big improvement over the previous methods – and a workable solution for some financial professionals, who took naturally to the software. However, the burden was primarily on the IT department to deliver information on demand. "At best, we were able to create reports for a select group of finance professionals, which represents a relatively small subset of the overall employee population," Hafitz recalls.
Studying the Options
In the mid-1990s, Emory University purchased a client/server reporting software package in an attempt to create an end-user reporting environment. The software worked fine for departmental reporting tasks, but once they upgraded to the Web version, they found it inadequate for enterprise-scale reporting needs. Hafitz and his team viewed a demonstration of WebFOCUS and were pleased with its extensive capabilities for Web-based reporting. Designed from the ground up for Web deployment, WebFOCUS does not require users to install any client-side software (other than a standard Web browser). Its server-based architecture simplifies software maintenance, streamlines report distribution, and minimizes network activity.
"The WebFOCUS software is very stable and easy to use," confirms Hafitz. "We can use it to revamp existing report procedures or create new procedures very quickly."
WebFOCUS dynamically generates HTML, which means desktop clients don't have to create reports locally. Only formatted HTML pages are sent over the network for display in the user's browser - an efficient and inherently scalable approach. Additionally, WebFOCUS uses Java™ Servlets to support multiple concurrent users with a single processor. All connections are multithreaded and nonpersistent, reducing hardware requirements and improving reliability.
Educating Financial Users
Since then, Hafitz and his team have used WebFOCUS to develop many types of financial reports. Key developers working with Hafitz include FOCUS developer Bill Collins, Web developer James Goff, systems programmer Len Butera, and finance applications team leader Curt Stauffer. These developers primarily use FOCUS for Mainframe to create and test report procedures, which are then executed using WebFOCUS. "We have been developing FOCEXEC procedures for years, and WebFOCUS allows us to leverage these procedures in a modern, Web-based environment," says Hafitz.
Authorized users throughout campus can access reports from the Finance division home page simply by clicking on the "Reports & Research" button. After entering a username and password, they are presented with a screen that lists many different options for reports. Output can be presented in Excel, PDF, or HTML formats.
"Our users can access these reports from any Web browser on any device," says Hafitz. "The reporting environment is extremely intuitive - they simply point-and-click to see results in the format of their choice."
Financial users no longer have to wait until the end of the month to reconcile their accounts. Each night, pertinent financial data is copied from Emory's production VSAM databases to a DB2 database, which is structured for reporting and directly accessible by authorized WebFOCUS users.
Hafitz says the new reporting system makes a world of difference for the university. "In the old days, Finance users had to thumb through lengthy printed reports to find information, then spend extra time putting it in a form that they could use," he notes. "Now they can download data directly into Excel and use powerful tools for searching, sorting, summarizing, and analyzing the information. They don't need any training or programming knowledge to use the system. They simply select reports from the list; from there it is all point-and-click."
Now that current financial information is readily available, employees can make fast, accurate decisions. In the past, they could only request reports during business hours, and even then, it would take several days to get the information they needed. Now they can access the data they need all by themselves, 24 hours a day.
"WebFOCUS has helped us eliminate phone calls to my staff and minimize paper reports," Hafitz says. "Our group is better equipped to deliver the information each user needs, in the form they need to be more productive."
Eyeing the Future
In the future, the university hopes to use WebFOCUS to access other data sources as well, such as an Oracle database that stores PeopleSoft human resources data on a UNIX platform. "Payroll data from PeopleSoft is linked to our general ledger," explains Hafitz. "With WebFOCUS, we can build a cohesive reporting environment that encompasses both domains."
There are many different types of reporting software in use at the university, but Hafitz believes WebFOCUS strikes the right balance between innovation and ease-of-use. "It all comes back to how quickly our employees can get the information they need to make accurate decisions," he concludes. "With WebFOCUS, we have a highly advanced reporting environment, and the boost in productivity is undeniable. Our IT staff can focus on strategic projects while financial employees help themselves to the information they need. The organization is more efficient all around."
