Bendigo Kangan Institute

Managers can now access real-time business intelligence for strategic decision making

Case study highlights

  • Saved 3 days by automating reporting
  • Access to accurate, real time information
  • Quickly analysed gaps in revenue targets

Challenge

Bendigo Kangan Institute was looking to simplify its dashboard reporting, to provide managers with real-time, self-service access to information. The institute was seeking an intuitive business intelligence system that would enable it to consolidate financial and student information, and automate reporting.

"Our Student Contact Hours (SCH) reporting requires us to bring together revenue information from our financials system and student management information. This was a manual process, which was only done every fortnight," said Commercial and Systems Manager - Finance, Amanda Morrison.

"To produce the report each fortnight would take someone a full day, and by the time they had compiled, analysed and distributed it, the data was already two to three days old."

Solution

Bendigo Kangan Institute implemented TechnologyOne Business Intelligence (BI) and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), enabling it to integrate, share and centrally manage data across the entire business, and consolidate transactional data into relevant, timely and accurate information.

Outcome

Bendigo Kangan Institute has used TechnologyOne's OneEducation software to bring together financial, budgeting and student information for comprehensive enterprise analysis of the business.

"We have been able to link budgets, targets and student cohort data to our actual revenue. This allows us to quickly determine and analyse any gaps between our SCH and revenue targets. Our understanding of the links between these aspects of the business has greatly improved as a result," said Ms Morrison.

"We can now deliver this reporting overnight, rather than once a fortnight. Consolidation of the financial and student information is automated, which has saved a minimum of three days a month. The information is also in real time, which means any time a manager wants to look at it, it's there and current."

Customer's perspective

Bendigo Kangan Institute formed on 1 July 2014, following the merger of Bendigo TAFE and Kangan Institute. The institute delivers a wide variety of vocational courses to over 9,000 students across its five campuses. The institute was finding it difficult to consolidate financial and student data from its systems for reporting, and implemented a business intelligence solution to streamline the process.

"We purchased TechnologyOne BI because we wanted to deliver enterprise analysis across multiple applications, without having to do it manually each month," Commercial and Systems Manager - Finance, Amanda Morrison said.

"Our management team pushed for a business intelligence system, because they regularly needed access to all kinds of information. Now the system offers self service, and managers can easily find what they need.

"Our reports are no longer static, so they can drill right down to individual student names and IDs, or exact revenue targets.

"This means our managers don't need to waste time searching for this kind of information from someone in the business - they can just drill down themselves, whenever they need to."

The institute implemented TechnologyOne BI to integrate with Bendigo TAFE's existing TechnologyOne Financials and Student Management products. Ms Morrison said using a number of TechnologyOne products as part of a single enterprise solution has provided a great user experience.

"As the system offers the same user interface, moving across the products and identifying elements in the dashboards has been easy. Our users have found the system very intuitive, and it has really reduced training time and costs for the business."

Spotlight

The TechnologyOne ETL (Extract Transform, Load) tool has enabled Bendigo Kangan Institute to automate many of its manual processes, and easily extract and analyse information across the business.

"We now have the ability to build in core data analysis, which would have otherwise taken the finance team a couple of months a year to compile," Ms Morrison said.

"In any education facility you have 40 - 50 cost centres to align with each of the different support units. To analyse these different budgets every month for budget variance analysis was just too time consuming to be realistic. A lot of this analysis was just not being done.

"Now ETL automates this process, and enables us to focus instead on analysing the data, and adding value to the business."

Ms Morrison said the institute was exploring the use of ETL to extract non-financial student data to support its marketing operations.

"When we enroll a student we capture a lot of data about them, but some of that information is currently not being used," she said. "We're now looking to extract that data at the outset, so we can tap into that information source for marketing business development.

"Moving forward, we'll be looking to deliver some more KPI-style reporting for things like purchasing, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. This will allow us to improve productivity across all aspects of the business."

About Bendigo Kangan Institute

Bendigo Kangan Institute formed on 1 July 2014, following the merger of Bendigo TAFE and Kangan Institute. Collectively the organisation has been transforming lives for more than 155 years.

The institute has a rich history of providing education for local people and preparing them for work in local jobs. Through a network of five campuses, it delivers a wide variety of vocational courses to over 9,000 students every year.

Bendigo Kangan Institute website

Publish date

29 Jun 2015

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