The Challenge
Imperial Valley College (IVC), a public community college located in Imperial, CA, experienced significant growth. But that success didn’t come easy. For many years, IVC used Microsoft Access as their database and Ellucian Banner for baseline reports. These options felt limited when it came to design and format. They needed a true reporting solution. In addition, management and staff needed ad-hoc reports with more specific data and formats.
IVC also had to manually generate and distribute reports to a list of people, which was both inefficient and time consuming. Ultimately, they were restricted by what was available to them and chose to see what else they could do.
The Solution
Already utilizing FormFusion and IntelleCheck from Evisions, IVC decided to add Argos to their lineup. After comparing the functionality, ease of use, and pricing of Argos to other reporting platforms, it was the wide range of capabilities for the price that led the college to their decision.
Since its implementation, Argos has proven to be a very important tool that’s used daily by different departments such as HR, Finance, Financial Aid, Instruction, Business Office, and Student Success. The enterprise licensing model of Argos allowed Imperial Valley College to give every fulltime employee – and many part time employees – an Argos account. This was vital since almost every employee at IVC uses Argos at least once, if not on a regular basis.
Ever since implementing Argos across all departments, the main benefit has been the ability to get accurate, well-formatted information to the appropriate audience in a timely manner. With Argos, users can create reports in a matter of hours or days, depending on the complexity of the report itself, to make data-driven decisions. For the end user, this means having the ability to access data from different departments on demand.
Argos’s Scheduling & Delivery feature has helped IVC overcome the pain of manually generating reports and distributing them to a list of people. Now, they automatically generate and email banded reports, such as the Faculty Load Report, on a daily basis. Same for CSV files required by one of their third-party systems.
Though Argos has many functions and elaborate capabilities, the system is easy to learn. For example, the Senior Programmer/Systems Analyst in IT Application Services raves that it only took him a couple of weeks to go from knowing absolutely nothing to creating complex reports after watching the recorded online training sessions.
Not only has IVC has been able to create custom Argos reports to their liking, but they’ve also used Evisions’ CO-OP as a tool to get ideas from other institutions. To Imperial Valley College, the CO-OP has been a valuable tool to see what other Argos users are doing, how they’re doing it, and to avoid reinventing the wheel if there’s a solution already out there.
IVC is also taking advantage of Argos’s ability to go beyond just reporting. For example, they’re using Argos as an electronic input form (like an application) to get input from the user and then push that data into the database. This has allowed the college to build electronic multi-approval requests. Examples of this are: Leave Requests, Change of Program for the students, Abbreviated EdPlan, Graduation Application, Administrators Interactive Service Days Calendar, Medical Benefits Change, and Part Time Office Hour.
Over time, Imperial Valley College has seen Evisions continue to improve Argos’s features and functionality – almost always based on client feedback. That, to them, is a sign that Evisions has their reporting success in mind and is why they continue to choose Argos.
“Argos allowed us to consolidate reports into a centralized location through a web browser. Prior to Argos, reports and data were scattered across different tools on employee desks in various formats. Through Argos, reports are sustainable and manageable.”
“We really appreciate being able to request the data we need and get it in a format that we can generate easily on demand.”
“Argos gives us the ability to produce many kinds of reports which makes our jobs much easier.”