Franklin University's Gateway to Success

Education Institution Supports Growth Initiatives With WebFOCUS

Franklin University was founded in 1902 in Columbus, Ohio, to meet the needs of students who have to combine their education with many other responsibilities. The tradition continues to this day: Franklin is well known for its high-quality, affordable, and accessible degree programs, which are enjoyed by more than 11,000 non-traditional students annually around the world.

In 2008, senior managers at the university identified several strategic initiatives to grow the university’s enrollment – domestically, internationally, and in its academic program offerings. With an aggressive timeline for rolling out these initiatives and the need for timely, easily accessible information to achieve those objectives, the university had to improve financial reporting and find a better way to convey information to decision-makers.

Until then, Franklin’s manual reporting procedures were neither efficient nor flexible enough to support these growth-related goals. Generating reports and spreadsheets was largely a manual process that diverted IT resources from conducting in-depth analysis. Some staff members maintained their own private spreadsheets to compensate for the lack of timely or flexible information, resulting in "spread marts" outside of the organization’s sanctioned IT environment. "If one individual typed a number incorrectly or did not have the complete picture, their totals could very likely be different than the numbers drawn directly from the transactional system, leading to different versions of the truth," says Gayle DeGennaro, an enterprise data architect at Franklin University.

The complexity of the transactional system created additional challenges, since few people could directly retrieve detailed information when they needed it. "Most people with budgetary responsibility had to contact the finance and accounting department if they wanted line item details," says DeGennaro. "This only increased the problem with the spread marts."

After evaluating several other vendors, Franklin chose Information Builders to support a Web-based reporting system that allows authorized users in each department to access budget, spending, and revenue information. Department administrators now have instant access to critical financial and budget information that used to take as much as a full day to compile and validate. The result is improved staff efficiency, as well as better budgetary planning and management across the university. Problems or troublesome trends in spending and revenues can now be immediately identified and addressed.

In fact, the application has been so successful that Franklin plans to extend its use of WebFOCUS to support enrollment reporting. Valuable insight into key enrollment activities, such as the number of students and the credit hours earned, will help the university drive revenue growth.

And so a new BI initiative was born called the Business Intelligence Gateway.

Self Sufficiency in Budgeting and Planning

Franklin used iWay DataMigrator to extract data from the university’s operational systems, convert it into a standard format, and load it into a data warehouse. Information Builders Professional Services helped the university develop the data architecture and design Web-based reporting forms for presenting information. Each WebFOCUS template serves a variety of purposes. The bulk of the reporting is performed against an SQL Server database. Financial information comes from a UniData database that has been moved to the SQL Server database.

Building on this architecture, DeGennaro used the WebFOCUS Financial Modeling Language, part of WebFOCUS Developer Studio, to create income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements from the university’s general ledger. She also created a role-based security architecture that only permits people with fiscal responsibility to access these reports – about 50 to 60 people in student services, information services, the library, the marketing department, the president’s office, purchasing/finance, transfer credit, and facilities.

Historically, finance officers downloaded data from the general ledger to a Microsoft Access database and then created monthly reports for each of these departments. "They spent an entire day separating hard-copy reports by cost center, placing them in interoffice envelopes, and distributing them to different departments," explains DeGennaro. "They couldn’t include salary information in these reports because of security issues."

Now that the WebFOCUS reporting environment is in production, department administrators within each cost center can retrieve the financial statements and budget reports every day, without assistance from the finance staff. They can easily determine, for example, why budgeted and actual amounts differ, and then drill down to narrow the information by date ranges, locations, cost centers, or object codes. They can output these reports in HTML, Excel, PDF, or Active Report formats.

"It used to take 15 to 30 minutes to set up the spreadsheet, and then a whole day verifying the information," says DeGennaro. "The new reporting system only takes two to three seconds to download all of the information, check the links, and map them out. In addition, we have loaded five years of historical data into the system, which allows for better budgetary planning."

When fully deployed, there will be 80 to 90 staff and faculty administrators using the new reports. "I definitely anticipate savings long term," says Kurt Weidner, director of Finance at Franklin, who worked with DeGennaro to design the reports. "WebFOCUS is very intuitive. With a little bit of training, these people can run reports and save them in a library for viewing online. They only print the reports when necessary."

DeGennaro agrees, saying people that formerly did not have access to the transactional system can now use WebFOCUS to manage their budgets, as well as track spending and revenue. This frees up the finance department to focus on the fiscal success of the university instead of generating reports for the management team.

Franklin is using WebFOCUS not only for reporting within each cost center, but also to create consolidated financial reports. Previously, says Weidner, it took half a day to manually key in departmental information to create these consolidated reports, and even longer to identify significant trends. Now it’s instantaneous. "WebFOCUS enables me to identify the source of a problem and take action right away," Weidner notes.

Managing Enrollment, Driving Growth

The next Gateway initiative for the university is to use the WebFOCUS reporting system to manage enrollment. The university’s revenue drivers are measured based on two calculations: the number of students and the number of credit hours, also known as enrollment. Once the enrollment module of the Business Intelligence Gateway is complete, staff members will be able to take a strategic approach to examining these measures. WebFOCUS will help people continually analyze enrollment at each location to determine how many students are majoring in each program, how quickly the international locations are growing, and other important variables.

According to DeGennaro, the enrollment module is much more complex than the financial module and it will be made available to a much larger university population. "Having exact data definitions is vital to the success of the system," she explains. "In addition, more detailed drill downs will be needed to support the decision-makers, who have to continually review the success of the university’s strategic initiatives."

For example, a department administrator planning next year’s curriculum might want to compare the performance of students taking online courses with the performance of students taking traditional courses within a particular major. A faculty member might want to know which courses a student took prior to enrolling in his or her class. "These people shouldn’t have to thumb through several pages of printouts to find each bit of information, and then stitch it all together," says Dr. Jan Lyddon, director of Institutional Effectiveness at the university. "We want to empower faculty, advisors, and other staff members to discover these things on their own."

This self-sufficiency will free up Dr. Lyddon and her staff to spend time filling the gaps that remain, such as helping people interpret the data or conduct strategic planning analyses and projections. Being able to easily analyze historic trends will help them predict what might happen in the future. "Franklin is very goal centered. However, we haven’t always had the information we need to effectively manage these goals," she explains. "We have lots of spreadsheets, but difficulty bringing it all together to make comprehensive decisions."

For example, faculty and staff members need complete information about each student such as the courses they are taking, how well they are performing, whether they are planning to enroll again next year, and so on. To keep track of these variables, Dr. Lyddon estimates that her staff spends one and a half to two days per week manipulating data and creating enrollment reports, which doesn’t leave much time for analysis. WebFOCUS will enable the team to personalize how they access and aggregate the data. Franklin plans to use WebFOCUS Visual Discovery to graphically depict the university’s progress towards its strategic goals.