Friends University Matriculates to Institutional Reporting

Integrated BI Environment Improves Administrative Efficiency and Decision-Making

With a population of more than 3,000, Friends University is one of the first educational institutions in Kansas to offer flexible academic programs that accommodate full-time students as well as busy adults. While younger students typically enroll in traditional daytime classes, adult students can attend classes during the evening or weekends to complete their coursework for an associate, bachelors, or master's degree. Rather than following a strict semester schedule, Friends' cohort program lets students begin at any time during the year and move through the program in a group.

Mixing traditional and non-traditional schedules creates a flexible learning environment, but it can be a logistical nightmare for the people managing admissions, financial aid, registration, and student affairs. In order to keep pace, Friends has been operating via two distinct business models – making the need for current, accurate information incredibly urgent. As a result, the IT department at Friends was struggling to meet administrators' increasing demands for custom reports. 

Information Builders stepped in to help the university meet these reporting and information-management challenges in a consistent, economical way. The school now has a campus-wide business intelligence (BI) and reporting environment that extracts data from its enterprise software applications and delivers it to 400 active users throughout the institution. School administrators can report on everything from student enrollment to finance. Faculty members can review the history and performance of their students. And other staff members can track student enrollment, alumni activities, and class attendance.

Providing people in various departments – finance, student affairs, advancement, financial aid, admissions, institutional research, and the registrar's office – with real-time access to the information they need has significantly improved productivity and created a more efficient working environment. 

Maximizing Administrative Efficiency

Cynthia Jacobson, director of IT business services, and her colleagues have always worked to improve the university's administrative reporting capabilities. The current BI initiative was motivated by a transition from a legacy ERP system to a SunGard Banner environment. Running on a cost-effective Linux system with an Oracle database, the Banner system offers the school a range of new capabilities, but limited reporting capabilities were causing an administrative bottleneck. For example, the legacy reporting tool offered only rudimentary security and ad hoc query functionality, which meant most departments depended on IT to run their reports. 

"Banner offered a lot of advantages for our university, but we needed a business intelligence platform to maximize those benefits," explains Jacobson.

The university reviewed BI packages from Argos, Oracle, Cognos, and Microsoft before selecting Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform. "We realized that WebFOCUS was a mature information delivery platform," says Jacobson. "Its capabilities were years ahead of the competition, and we were impressed with Information Builders' understanding of the special requirements of higher education."

Jacobson and her team went straight to work creating a parameterized reporting environment built on the premise of self-sufficiency. For example, school administrators needed reports on everything from student enrollment to finance. Faculty members needed to know about the history and performance of their students. Other staff members needed to track student enrollment, alumni activities, and class attendance.

Previously, the IT department was building these reports over and over again in response to continually shifting demands. Now, thanks to WebFOCUS, Friends has a unified BI environment that puts real-time Banner data into the hands of people throughout the university.

"Before we got WebFOCUS, our department was spending too much time building these ad hoc reports," Jacobson acknowledges. "It was a real drain on our effectiveness, and there were so many reports out there, it was almost impossible to find a report that might fit a particular need. It really was unmanageable."

Leading the Way to a Prosperous Future

The school's objective for this BI project goes beyond improving standard Banner reports. The staff also wanted to create a more effective user community by giving them parameterized reports and graphs to drill down into the data, such as to compare term students to non-term students over a given date range.

Jon Helgason, director of administrative computing, is excited about the progress they have made with WebFOCUS. "Users get their results immediately and are not reliant on the IT department to run reports for them," he says. "Staff and faculty can easily access the information they want and output it in a familiar format like Excel. Across all campuses, we now have a powerful tool for query and analysis, and users are creating a much more efficient working environment."

As the BI initiative gains momentum, faculty and staff members find they have tremendous flexibility to access and analyze data. A single parameterized report allows them to see data in many different ways. For example, the financial aid office might want to create a list of students who are receiving aid sorted by their cumulative grade point averages or chosen majors. It's a simple process to select these students and then export the data to an Excel spreadsheet for additional analysis.

Information Builders Professional Services helped review the school's reporting needs, implement the BI software and establish a plan for going live. First they satisfied critical operational needs and then they addressed more advanced reporting capabilities. "We have been extremely pleased with our relationship with Information Builders," Jacobson notes. "They are knowledgeable about the Banner environment and they understand the subtleties of accessing the Oracle database. Best of all, they not only provide the ‘how-to,' but can also explain the ‘why' for our developers and users."

Information Builders Education experts trained ten key BI stakeholders, who went on to train 400 faculty and staff from finance, student affairs, advancement, financial aid, admissions, institutional research, and the registrar's office. "The trainers did a great job," says Jacobson. "They totally understood our sector, that we deal with people rather than a product, and they were able to use examples from education."

Previously, only faculty assistants could produce reports. Now most of the faculty members can access information by themselves. In the future, Friends University plans to create BI dashboards for several of its departments and to create scheduled and event-driven reports using WebFOCUS ReportCaster. They also plan to use WebFOCUS Open Portal Services to integrate the BI environment with Oracle Portal, enabling people to personalize the way they view, store, and retrieve information. The faculty and staff will then be able to use the same login information to access both WebFOCUS and Banner through the Oracle Portal interface."

"WebFOCUS has changed the operating dynamics of the university," concludes Jacobson. "Many people are more productive since they can get the information they need in real time. Requests to the IT department for student data have dropped off dramatically. We know where we are today rather than two months ago. And not only do we have good, professional-looking reports, we also have consistency and continuity across all of our locations."