SC Student Loan Renews iSeries Legacy

Nonprofit Lender Deploys DB2 Web Query to Create Reports, Dashboards, and KPIs for Business Users

The ever-rising cost of higher education, coupled with the tenuous nature of the current economy, is a source of great concern to students, parents, and education administrators around the country. Organizations like South Carolina Student Loan (SCSL) are vital in helping students get the funds they need to realize their college dreams. As an originator and servicer of student loans to South Carolina residents and students attending South Carolina institutions, SCSL works with the financial aid community and the federal government to deliver more than $7 billion in loans from the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) to more than 400,000 borrowers.

According to Tom Dunnigan, senior vice president and chief information officer at the non-profit organization, SCSL offers cradle-to-grave student lending services – from loan origination through the entire payment process. SCSL’s information systems automate most aspects of the lending lifecycle, but Dunnigan was convinced that his organization could better fulfill its charter by implementing business intelligence (BI) technology.

“I joined SCSL to help this organization meet a pent-up demand for IT capabilities,” says Dunnigan. “One of our primary goals was to obtain better management information for reporting, forecasting, and decision making.”

To create new business intelligence solutions – such as reports, key performance indicators (KPIs), and dashboards – SCSL purchased IBM DB2 Web Query for System i, a BI environment designed explicitly for IBM iSeries computers. Based on Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform, DB2Web Query for System i extends the IBM Query/400 toolset that SCSL used previously.

“We purchased DB2 Web Query to help forecast our financing needs,” Dunnigan says. “With its basis in WebFOCUS, our goal with this reporting software is to deliver real-time, actionable information that supports our company operationally, delivering information that was not previously available under the legacy paradigm.”

Dunnigan and his team used the BI tools to construct reports and dashboards for managers in four departments: Financing Services, Repayment Services, Guaranty Services, and Information Services. Business users throughout the organization immediately started using the new decision-support environment. DB2 Web Query shields these users from the complexity of the underlying data. For example, it can automatically recognize relationships defined across tables or files and import them into its metadata, making it easier for non-technical users to understand the data.

Action Versus Reaction

Previously, managers at SCSL extracted DB2 data using IBM Query/400, and then printed or downloaded it into individual Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on the desktop. By the time they ran a Query 400 object and produced a report, the information was often obsolete. SCSL’s new dashboards present real-time information as color-coded charts and graphs to help managers monitor departmental KPIs. This level of monitoring is a huge advantage in the highly regulated student loan industry.

Using a DB2 Web Query dashboard, the Financing Services department can also carefully monitor future loan disbursements to deliver just-in-time financing and maximize cash flow. The department has visibility into loans that SCSL must disperse for three months in advance. The dashboard also enables managers to drill down by school and student to research specific cases and note anomalies or issues as they arise. “Before Web Query, the financing group would have to extract this information from various tables and combine it on their own,” says Dunnigan. “Now it is a click away.”

SCSL’s Guaranty Services department depends on a DB2 Web Query dashboard to balance the workload for loan recovery and rehabilitation efforts. Using the dashboard, managers can continually measure staff activity and spot weak points where training can boost productivity. Instead of waiting until the end of the month, they can make mid-month corrections to keep the team on track.

“Before the introduction of IBM DB2 Web Query, I would typically have to wait until the end of the month in order to discover if my key metrics were being met,” says David Roupe, vice president of Guaranty Services at SCSL. “Now I can view metrics interactively through pie charts and graphs with a couple of key strokes.” As a result, the Guaranty Services staff is handling a higher volume of claims with no incremental headcount.

Meanwhile, the Repayment Services department, which works with students and parents during the loan repayment period, relies on fresh data in another dashboard to keep all borrowers in good standing. The reports generated by DB2 Web Query give them instant visibility into delinquent accounts, enabling the team to continually adjust its customer outreach efforts based on the real-time, day-to-day needs. Thanks to the dashboard and corresponding improvements to its callout campaigns, this department has been able to reallocate three people from creating reports and shuffling papers to calling customers.

“DB2 Web Query allows users to input various parameters, including dates and loan types, and then acquire data based on those specific parameters,” says Alan Taylor, senior systems engineer at SCSL. “This allows them to control the data retrieved for analysis and forecasting. Users get exactly what they need.”

Rapid Redevelopment of Legacy Reports

Taylor developed all four dashboards and about 60 associated reports over a five-month period, replacing hundreds of Query/400 objects with a handful of DB2 Web Query objects. He went on to train five other people to use the Web Query tools. SCSL now has 80 active users of DB2 Web Query. Many of these people use the embedded OLAP capabilities to view business information in multiple dimensions, such as by time, type of loan, and school. Developers can easily add charting, parameterization, and OLAP capabilities to their reports, or view reports in disconnected mode through the Active Reports output option.

With more than 2,000 Query/400 procedures, SCSL is substantiating the validity of these claims. Dunnigan says that being able to execute the Query/400 objects enables SCSL to control the cost of introducing business intelligence technology and spread it out over time. “Rather than trying to pay for it all at once and then struggle over months or even years to generate value that correlates to that cost, we can gradually transition to the new reporting environment,” he notes. “DB2 Web Query was the best way to introduce business intelligence technology throughout the company and to begin discovering information within our data. Now we get real-time information that enables us to take immediate action.”

Dunnigan and his team plan to continue deploying DB2 Web Query as the foundation for their BI strategy and are considering purchasing WebFOCUS as their business intelligence endeavors mature. “We know that we have the flexibility to move into the complete WebFOCUS product suite as our company realizes the need for more robust reporting capabilities,” he concludes.