Customers

UQÀM

"BusinessObjects has given us a dramatic difference in our ability to process and understand data."

Lise Carriere
director, institutional research
Université du Québec à Montréal

Challenge

Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), a public, French-language urban university situated in Montreal, Canada, offers a wide range of programs to approximately 40,000 undergraduate, graduate, and research students, and 20,000 distance-learning students. UQÀM employs more than 3,000 professors, lecturers, and support staff. Not surprisingly, with tens of thousands of current and potential students each year, the amount of data the university needs to sift through and report on is daunting – and the pressure to produce clear, concise, timely reports was building.

Lise Carriere, director of institutional research at UQÀM, recalls, "With pressure from the government and other entities, it was urgent that we disseminate data rapidly, yet we were always one year late." University decision-makers—deans, vice-presidents, presidents, and administrators—required access to student lifecycle data that was stored in multiple independent systems. Depending on which system they accessed, users received different results. "We needed a way to combine data and obtain a single, coherent view," says Carriere. "We were producing either student data or research data or financial support data—there was never a way that we could combine the data and have a better grasp of what was happening."

Carriere and her team are responsible for tracking the lifecycle of students—from application through graduation—to understand trends such as demographics, attrition rates, admissions data, and program-specific information. Such information helps the university to establish its recruitment strategy, remain competitive in the market, and attract first-rate students and professors. In addition to student data, UQÀM reports on research and financial activities, including grants, to provide key institutional data and key performance indicators (KPIs) to government and academic overseers. Carriere explains, "We have to provide information on graduation rates, the length of time it takes to graduate, the number of students in each big discipline, student retention, and other student lifecycle information, and also provide program performance and other kinds of financial data."

The university also maintains data on alumni and anyone who has ever applied to the university. All of the data—student, research, finance, and historical—is used by university administrators and faculty for strategic planning, trend analysis, and decision-making. UQÀM uses the data to support decisions on how to allocate grants, whether to invest more or less in various academic programs and research efforts, and what kind of financial support is needed to raise the graduation rate. "Analyzing data related to curriculum, programs, and departments—such as the average number of students per courses, how many courses are duplicated, and so on—helps us raise the efficiency of training, decide our recruitment strategy, access program quality, and make decisions about closing, changing, or developing new programs," says Carriere.

UQÀM needed an easy-to-use, Web-based reporting and analysis tool to make program information and student lifecycle information accessible to a large number of users with varying degrees of technical skills. The university also needed a way of consolidating all of its disparate data without complex coding and script writing. To expedite reporting and obtain greater visibility into data, the university developed a data warehouse along with a business intelligence (BI) solution.

Approach

UQÀM evaluated four different vendors before choosing solutions from Business Objects, an SAP company. Carriere's team established a range of criteria that Business Objects solutions fulfilled. "We wanted an open system, reports that weren't static but were dynamic and easy to develop, easy training, and integrated modules," says Carriere. "When we finished the analysis, it was clear that Business Objects was right there upfront and by a wide margin, according to the criteria we were looking at."

After using Business Objects BI solutions successfully for three years, UQÀM is upgrading to BusinessObjects™ XI 3.0 to take advantage of even greater functionality. After beta testing XI 3.0, Carriere says, "We are happy with the new front-end features of XI 3.0 – being able to track changes and key information is going to be a huge bonus for our users." For example, UQÀM users can view differences in funding or financial aid over time. "I can see how from the last time I ran a report, if there was a sharp increase or decrease in the amount of financial aid we provided to students, and so on," says Carriere. "XI 3.0 makes it even easier for our users to track information and to see what the changes are since the last time they accessed the system."

Tanya Bressi, BI director at UQÀM, adds, "Many of our users want to run and rerun reports to identify changes from one step to another. The new XI 3.0 interface gives us the ability to track what happened a week or month ago and compare it with today, giving our users the information they need to identify trends and remain competitive."

In addition to BusinessObjects XI 3.0, the university's Business Objects solution includes BusinessObjects Data Integrator, used for extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes. With Data Integrator, operational data is loaded into the data warehouse seamlessly and without complex coding, giving end users across the university a single, integrated view of the business. Carriere adds, "We're using universe designer to create views for the different business groups and departments." The custom views ensure that UQÀM research analysts, coordinators, administrators, recruiters, and program directors easily access the data relevant to their needs.

UQÀM uses BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® for Web-based query and reporting, and Xcelsius® for visualization and forecasting. "We are excited about deploying Xcelsius," says Tanya Bressi, BI director at UQÀM. "It will allow us to do forecasting and be able to deploy data dashboards very quickly. Xcelsius will help us get from A to Z a lot faster."

Results

UQÀM carefully defined report specifications before building data marts for each academic and business department. "We make sure our reports meet a need and that everyone's needs are covered," Bressi says. In addition to the power users, who are members of Bressi's team that build reports using Web intelligence, UQÀM users include "navigators"—business users, such as deans and other high-level managers. "The navigators are able to access the system, look at the data that's tailored for them, print it, send it, and explore it," says Bressi. "One of the big benefits with BusinessObjects XI 3.0, and also with XI Release 2, is the ability to navigate a report and explore the data to its fullest. Being able to pull out the information the way you want to see it without having to be a report developer—and with minimal training—is very beneficial. UQÀM personnel can use BusinessObjects for ad hoc reporting and supplemental data mining."

Accessing data over the Web, UQÀM employees plan new programs, address enrollment or attrition rates, and create strategies to further ensure student success. Combining student data, research data, human resources data, and grant information gives administrators insight into internal financial support for students. With all operational data consolidated into a data warehouse, decision-makers better grasp what's happening at the university. "If you want to understand what's going on, you've got to combine data from different sources," says Carriere. "BusinessObjects gives us the coherent view we need."

UQÀM anticipates that BusinessObjects XI 3.0 will continue to improve its ability to analyze and make sense of integrated data. "BusinessObjects has given us a dramatic difference in our ability to process and understand data," says Carriere. "And the analytic part—which we did not have time to do before our BI deployment—is going to become more and more important. Before, we were kept at the descriptive level, with one subject per subject; we couldn't cross topics or cross subjects. Before, we were chasing the numbers, and now we're able to understand the numbers and give them meaning." Ultimately, the ability for users across the organization to access BusinessObjects reports helps UQÀM's end users makes better, more informed decisions.

Benefits are already clear. During a recent audit, UQÀM used data marts and BusinessObjects Web Intelligence to reduce a financial reporting effort from months to minutes. Carriere says, "We were able to put up some reports very, very rapidly, which we could never have done before. I had three analysts making reports, and I'd have to wait for months for the results. So I would say that return on investment (ROI) with Business Objects is huge – the time-savings is tremendous."

Where the previous effort was complex and laborious, with a lot of cutting and pasting in Excel, combining data from disparate systems, one particular financial report took a year-and-a-half just to produce. Bressi says, "Now, after developing the data mart, which took three months, users now can go into Web Intelligence and get the information in minutes. And they have more data now, and more analytic views of data that used to take two people working full time a year-and-a-half to get."

Carriere says, "That is the most dramatic example of our time savings with BusinessObjects, but it will keep repeating itself. Instead of taking months of getting data and copying it into Excel, it will take our users seconds or minutes, and this will be a regular occurrence."

Bressi agrees, "I think we're going to see a lot more dramatic ROI this year. I love that anyone on my team can build a universe, anyone can manage security, anyone can build a report, and considering that we're all at different levels technologically, that's pretty amazing."

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