Click here to download a PDF version of this Snap Shot

Click here to download a Spanish translation of this Snap Shot

Challenge

Time consuming and slow. That was the situation for Australian Catholic University (ACU) who were using spreadsheets for their Direct Admissions reporting. The IT department had to manually assemble reports which were massive and unwieldy. Not only did the reports take an entire week to create, they also took a long time for staff to download because they were distributed as email attachments. All of these inconveniences were made even worse when you consider that by the time ACU staff finally received the Direct Admissions Report, the data was already out-of-date.

ACU needed a faster, more efficient way to get accurate data to their decision makers. They needed a solution that would allow end-users to easily manipulate data and provide one consistent version of the truth. This solution also had to be flexible and easy to roll-out to their six campuses.

Solution

ACU found the solution to their challenge in Argos, the Enterprise Reporting Solution from Evisions. Argos has greatly enhanced ACU’s reporting capabilities, resulting in increased enrolment and better admissions tracking. Reports that once took a week to create are now run automatically, thus freeing up much-needed time for the IT department.

Working together, ACU and Evisions developed a report for their direct admissions which features information that is most important to them, including admissions trends and application decisions by type and campus. The Direct Admissions Report gives staff access to live data so they can track admissions, enrolment and retention on a daily basis. ACU staff who monitor admissions within the faculties use a Dashboard which allows them to view key admissions data at-a-glance in the form of charts and graphs. Decision-makers can read information at a birds-eye view through the Dashboard or drilldown into the data with the OLAP tool. The OLAP cubes make it easy to thoroughly investigate their data and determine needs.

ACU also uses the Scheduling & Delivery Advanced Feature of Argos to send the report to staff members on a regular schedule – when they arrive at work in the morning the report is waiting for them.

The ACU Administrative staff no longer requires IT to run their reports. Developers create the report parameters and schedule it to run automatically, thus freeing IT staff from a tedious & lengthy task. The IT faculty has also saved a lot of time by downloading pre-built report components from the Evisions CO-OP User Community site.

ACU has six campuses spanning a distance of almost 2,000 kilometres. Now, with Argos, staff members from every faculty on every campus have access to the same live data with no inconsistencies between reports. The ability to deploy Argos to an unlimited number of users on every campus without installing anything on individual computers also saves the IT faculty a considerable amount of time that would have been spent on replicating work.

ACU has found Argos to be highly flexible and easy to configure to Australian university needs. In fact, ACU was up-and-running in just one week, including three days of training. ACU used Evisions Professional Services both in-person and online for training and report development.

Going forward, ACU plans to use Argos to increase student retention by tracking applications, admissions and enrolment. Now that ACU has easy access to their admissions data – plus the added time it needs for more efficient operations – the university can now pursue many new opportunities.

"Argos allows me to provide the Faculty Deans with up-to-the minute data on admissions where previously it took around a week to get that information together. The dashboards make it so much easier to understand the data."
Claron Driscoll Admissions Manager

"Argos is user friendly.  The banded report allows for easy creation of formatted reports.  Pre-designed reports provide a quick way to extract the data required."
Gabriel Spata Student Systems Support Officer

"Argos saves significant time in getting data to end users throughout the Academic cycle from admission through enrolment and onto Graduation."
Leo Macpherson Assistant Academic Registrar (Systems)