Meharry Medical College Brushes Up on Business Intelligence

Medical Science Center Takes Reporting to a New Level

Founded in 1876, Meharry Medical College is a fully accredited academic health science center, providing both medical and dental programs, master's degrees in public health and clinical investigation, PhDs in biomedical science, and a certificate in health policy. Affiliated with Metro-General Hospital, where students receive training and faculty members provide medical care, Meharry has a diverse group of system users.

The school's enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and the reporting tools that supported them, weren't able to handle the stringent information needs of not only faculty and administrative staff, but also students. Users were forced to rely on the help of the IT department each time they needed a new report or wanted to update the information contained in an existing one.

When Meharry decided to upgrade its reporting systems, it selected WebFOCUS – a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) reporting platform that has proven its worth at dozens of higher education institutions. Today, with the help of WebFOCUS, Meharry has graduated to a new level of BI, allowing more than 200 users to easily retrieve and analyze their own information in the areas of human resources, student admissions, student records, and finance, whenever they need it.

By creatively applying WebFOCUS as its BI standard, Meharry is encouraging self-sufficiency among its staff, which has delivered measurable improvements in efficiency, while saving tens of thousands of dollars per year formerly spent printing and distributing reports.

The Right Formula for Institutional Reporting

Like many universities, Meharry uses SunGard Banner, an ERP system created expressly for this sector. Banner includes an industry-specific data model that automates core data management functions. However, in this instance, the system's standard reports lacked the flexibility to suit the university's entire user base, including students, faculty, and staff members in finance, human resources, admissions, and other departments.

When Meharry decided to upgrade its mainframe-based information systems to accommodate the Oracle-based Banner system, the IT staff faced the dual challenge of implementing new software for administrative purposes while simultaneously upgrading the institution's reporting platform. It was a big transition, but one that many colleges and universities are making as they find new ways to implement BI solutions to increase efficiency and cut costs.

"Under the old system, the IT department would develop a report with FOCUS at the request of specific users," says Erika Graves, director of Administrative Computing at Meharry Medical College. "Whenever those users would want to access that data again, the IT department had to find and run the reports again."

Graves and her team decided to build a new reporting system that would minimize these repetitive exercises. After witnessing the power and flexibility offered by WebFOCUS, and because of the school's familiarity with FOCUS, Graves and her team chose WebFOCUS as their new enterprise-wide BI platform.

Information Builders' Professional Services and Education departments helped Meharry make the transition to the new reporting system. Graves credits the Information Builders team for its outstanding consulting, training, and support. "Information Builders has a strong presence in our area and gives personal attention to its clients," she says. "Whenever we have issues, they give us the support we need."

Following the training, Meharry recreated many FOCUS report procedures that the staff uses on a day-to-day basis, developing new WebFOCUS reports for human resources, student admissions, student records, and finance. Today more than 200 people across campus use these parameterized reports to summarize information and drill down to transaction-level details. In addition, a growing community of power users is gaining proficiency with WebFOCUS Managed Reporting. These grassroots reporting efforts have put information into the hands of key decision-makers while alleviating the stress placed on the IT department to continually create new reports for every staff member's specific needs.

To further enhance the effectiveness of this new reporting platform, Graves and her team created a dashboard environment with intuitive displays tailored to the needs of each department. WebFOCUS reinforces Banner's security architecture to provide single sign-on access to both environments and protect sensitive information.

"People throughout campus can now access information when they need it, and they can view older reports to see if they fit their needs," explains Justin Martineau, business analyst at Meharry Medical College. "They know what questions to ask, whereas before when they requested reports they didn't know what they needed. Now their questions are more detailed, which means if they can't create a report for themselves, we are more likely to give them the reports they need."

Graduating to Self-Service BI

This enhanced level of communication between business and IT has simplified training and spawned many additional ad hoc reporting initiatives.

"The WebFOCUS interface is so easy for people to figure out," adds Graves. "We developed our own in-house training for both power users and casual users, who access the information they need with a single click. We run the training once a month as people need it."

Staff members who have attended the training session are largely self-sufficient, which means the IT department is no longer barraged with requests to access fundamental information from the Banner system. "WebFOCUS is a drag-and-drop environment that lets you define report parameters without the help of a developer or IT professional," Graves notes.

For example, new financial reports enable everyone from department administrators to vice presidents to see where funds are being allocated and how the department is tracking to its projected budget. WebFOCUS displays summary information, yet users can quickly drill down to view the details with a couple of clicks.

The HR department can view personnel reports that reveal how a person's salary has been funded, and how much of that salary has been extended throughout the year. Previously, the IT department had to extract data from several different information systems and manually combine it to create one bulky report that had to be manually sorted and distributed in hard copy form. This process used to be highly manual and very repetitive, and often included human errors or lapsed data. Now, WebFOCUS pulls the required information directly from the Oracle database, creating a single source of truth that eliminates human error and out-of-date information.

Meharry depends on WebFOCUS ReportCaster to distribute essential reports to each department automatically. Authorized users can analyze the information further by visiting their departmental dashboards.

Mastering Information Distribution

Through its cutting-edge report delivery engine, WebFOCUS ReportCaster provides a single point of control for real-time alerts, as well as a mechanism for scheduling, storing, and delivering information.

"Our reports are more accurate now because we derive information from a single data repository rather than relying on departmental databases and spreadsheets," explains Jim Powlus, vice president of Information Technology at Meharry. "We have also saved time and money by eliminating the printing, sorting, and manual distribution of reports."

Previously, getting this information was a time-consuming and tedious process. Now the information arrives automatically at the end of the month. Powlus estimates that electronically distributing payroll reports in this manner saves Meharry roughly $30,000 per year.

The admissions and records department is realizing additional savings by letting students access transcripts and other important information through a WebFOCUS dashboard. Other departments have plans to create their own dashboards to reduce their workloads and simplify access to the information they need each day.

"We have already saved a rainforest with all of the printing we've avoided," says Martineau. "It's amazing how much WebFOCUS has cut down on our printing costs. We only run the printer on special occasions now."

Adopting WebFOCUS as the institution's BI standard has minimized human error and increased efficiency for many common administrative tasks. When it comes to BI, Meharry is clearly making the grade.

"People can view reports online whenever they need to, which is helping our IT department make much better use of our limited bandwidth," concludes Martineau. "Our business users can now make better decisions by logging in and keeping track of relevant data – and that's something that's going to make a positive impact on Meharry for years to come."