WebFOCUS Customer Portal Boosts Efficiency of Both Internal and External Users
Snapshot
| Organization Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation's affiliated group of companies, one of the largest integrated providers of student-loan services in the United States. |
| The Challenge Integrate data to supply a diverse constituency access to information about educational loans, applications, approvals, payments, and consolidation activities; speed up the reporting and analysis of loan applications; and process and service loans more quickly and efficiently. |
| The Strategy Create an IT architecture that automatically combines information from multiple sources and makes it accessible through a Web-based reporting portal that includes standard and ad hoc reporting capabilities. |
| The Results Reduction in call volume as external users help themselves to information through the portal. |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, Consulting. |
Most banks and lending institutions depend heavily on mainframe computers for their core financial processing, while educational institutions have adopted distributed information systems and Web-based applications. Organizations that broker and service educational loans to students must be able to straddle both of these worlds: they must offer mainframe-caliber business processes for lenders as well as Web-based applications for servicing loans – all backed by a simple, intuitive way to access information online.
Precisely this challenge was met by Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc., the service provider for Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation and its affiliates. Great Lakes has been a national leader in the student-loan industry for more than 30 years, providing services to lenders, guaranty agencies, educational institutions, and students. Great Lakes' affiliated group of companies facilitates every aspect of the student-loan process and is one of the largest integrated providers of student-loan services in the United States.
"Our charter is to assist schools as well as lenders achieve one overriding goal: to help more students go to college," explains Marc Storch, who serves as chief of e-commerce at Great Lakes. "We work with schools and lenders to help them meet the needs of students seeking financial aid. We work with schools to help students through the application process and assist in the disbursement of funds. We also help lenders and borrowers in repayment of their loans. For example, borrowers often need insight into their rights, responsibilities, and opportunities when it comes time to repay their loans."
Until the early 1990s, Great Lakes depended on mainframe computer systems to manage the origination, servicing, and repayment of loans. The IS team at Great Lakes was asked to deploy a new set of distributed information systems that would allow for more flexibility in how they approach the business. "Our traditional business model was too rigid, so our information systems were inhibiting our ability to compete in the new areas we need to serve," Storch explained. "In our old model we were responsible for the entire process from originating a loan through repayment. Today we may only do parts or need to do them differently for different customers. We needed to be more flexible in the spectrum of services that we offered."
As Internet technologies picked up speed in the mid- to late 1990s, Great Lakes also became interested in adding Web-based reporting and information delivery capabilities. Since then, Storch and his team have undertaken a series of technology initiatives designed to increase flexibility while simplifying business dealings with customers. Central to these efforts are Web-based business intelligence capabilities that allow authorized users to access and view information on demand. Information Builders' WebFOCUS technology makes it possible.
"WebFOCUS gives us a wide variety of options for accessing, displaying, distributing, and analyzing information in a meaningful way," Storch notes. "We are very committed to adopting e-business processes and to using WebFOCUS to help us move in that direction."
Enrolling in e-Business
At the heart of Great Lakes' e-business environment is MyGreatLakes.com, a one-stop, single sign-on, Web-based portal. Lenders, borrowers, and financial aid officers can all visit the site to find information that pertains to them. For example, borrowers can access their accounts to see the status of a loan while lenders have access to statistics and consolidation information. Schools can avail themselves of ScholarNet®, a software tool that simplifies the process of obtaining financial aid. Behind the scenes, WebFOCUS accesses and combines information from various data sources to deliver results to each group of users. The site receives more than 4,000 visits per day and, through WebFOCUS, delivers about 40,000 on-demand and scheduled reports each month via a completely secure environment.
"MyGreatLakes.com is used by more than 780 schools, dramatically reducing the volume of calls coming into the Great Lakes call center," says Mike Walker, chief information officer at Great Lakes. "Without Information Builders, we would have needed technology from many different vendors to achieve the same results. WebFOCUS gives us everything we need in one complete package: back-end database access, business intelligence, reporting, scheduled information delivery, and the ability to present reports in many different formats."
The Great Lakes IS team evaluated a wide variety of business intelligence products before purchasing WebFOCUS. "WebFOCUS met our complete spectrum of needs in a cost-effective fashion," continues Storch. "We needed a reporting environment that could cut across IMS, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and many other databases. The environment needed strong self-service capabilities so our clients could access reports and do ad hoc reporting without our assistance. Finally, we wanted software from a stable vendor that would be around for the long haul. Information Builders had the capabilities we needed – for the best price."
Business Intelligence 101
Great Lakes sent five developers to a training class sponsored by Information Builders to gain basic proficiency in creating WebFOCUS applications. Once they completed the training, the developers worked with internal customer groups to determine what types of reporting and information-delivery capabilities they needed. The team included a graphic artist to ensure each application is useful and attractive to users. "With the Web, the entire experience is visual, so we want to make sure we are properly reflecting user needs," says Storch. "Once we obtain customer approval on the look and feel of an application, we do the behind-the-scenes work with WebFOCUS. This approach has saved us a lot of time and allowed us to meet our customer requirements very effectively."
Great Lakes' initial WebFOCUS applications are primarily designed to organize and deliver information through scheduled and on-demand reports. Within these standard reports, users can specify certain aspects of the presentation, such as the arrangement of fields and the output format used to display the results. Menus and other graphical devices make it easy for users to find the information they need.
WebFOCUS accesses data from many different sources to deliver results to users: several production DB2 databases on an IBM OS/390 mainframe computer, DB2 universal databases and Oracle databases on UNIX servers, and Microsoft SQL Server databases on Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers. This integration has no adverse impact on the back-end systems. The WebFOCUS architecture is completely nonintrusive to the systems with which it integrates.
Great Lakes uses Information Builders Consulting to augment its in-house development staff as necessary. For example, when they were developing their latest release of ScholarNet they needed to create and launch 30 reports simultaneously. Information Builders came through with the development services to complete the job. "We were very happy with the services Information Builders provided," says Storch. "Thanks to their efforts, we were able to complete the reports on time and within budget. Information Builders Consulting helped jump-start the project by delivering immediate experience and productivity to our in-house developers."
Graduating With Distinction
Before deploying the latest set of reports on the Web site, many users of Great Lakes' services had to call in with special requests for ad hoc reports to fulfill their needs. This has begun to change with the deployment of WebFOCUS reports. "WebFOCUS has tremendously facilitated the process of providing timely information," says Storch. "Our new reporting capabilities are giving us a competitive edge by facilitating the analysis and exchange of information to those who need it."
For example, when schools need to gather information that resides in many different information systems, they used to have to call Great Lakes and wait while a customer service representative tracked down the answers. Now they simply enter queries through a self-service Web portal. WebFOCUS simultaneously submits the necessary queries and returns the information through one cohesive report, even when multiple databases are involved.
Now that external users can help themselves to this type of information, Great Lakes is noticing measurable improvements in productivity. "We're handling a greater loan-servicing volume with less effort," Storch says. "WebFOCUS has given us a competitive advantage in our market by enabling customers to obtain more and better information with less IT support. WebFOCUS applications are eliminating thousands of customer support calls and greatly reducing requests for custom reports."
The goal is to have all the information requested through the Great Lakes origination system – for borrowers, lenders, and schools – displayed through WebFOCUS. "Thanks to our single-signon capabilities, users can log on once and get everything they need," Storch adds. "Competitors can't offer this same degree of service without requiring multiple logins."
Ultimately, the Great Lakes IS team plans to offer ad hoc reporting capabilities to internal support staff through the WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment. "We have received very positive feedback from the client community," Storch concludes. "There is an incredible escalation in interest as both our internal and external user community experiences the power of self-service applications."
