Customer story · Lansing Community College
Ensuring consistent, accurate, and timely financial aid data with Argos
Lansing Community College moved from “data anarchy” to one source of truth: hundreds of legacy reports converted to Argos, financial aid run from a single hub, and an estimated 240 staff hours saved a year.
Lansing, Michigan
Public, 2-year college
Argos
- Errors down 70%Employee data errors fell by an estimated 70 percent.
- One source for everyoneEveryone accesses data from the same source.
- 240 hours saved a yearStaff time once spent compiling employee lists in spreadsheets.
Lansing Community College at a glance
1957
Founded
17,600
Students
2,700
Faculty and staff
220
Undergraduate programs
3
Campuses
01
The challenge
One person, every report, days to weeks of waiting
For Lansing Community College (LCC), finding the right ERP and reporting solutions was decades in the making. Before Argos, departments and staff had difficulty pulling reports.
In the Financial Aid Office in particular, the majority of information came from a single person running ad hoc reports day in and day out.
One person, every request
Most financial aid information depended on a single person’s ad hoc reports.
Days to weeks
Compliance reporting bottlenecked work until simple transactions took days to weeks.
Inconsistent results
When administrators ran reports themselves, the data was inconsistent or slow to compile.
In 2009, it was time to say goodbye to the old reporting solution.
02
The solution
From “data anarchy” to a single hub
LCC turned to Argos, and its first major task was converting all of the college’s legacy reports. That brought some startling discoveries about how the college had been finding information through the years.
Users producing their own reports in the old software pulled different sets of data and couldn’t agree on what was accurate. Some even described it as “data anarchy.” So the college standardized and centralized report development, prioritizing reports for Financial Aid, Human Resources, and Purchasing.
In a few months, hundreds of reports were converted, and multiple reports, as many as 19 for one administrator, were consolidated into single Argos DataBlocks.
Financial Aid, rebuilt around Argos
The Financial Aid Office, a staff of 26 administrators and student workers, migrated about 50 reports to Argos in a few weeks, then set about writing new reports and creating DataBlocks and dashboards in house.
Its Financial Aid Dashboard houses summary and banded reports covering funds management, document management, and applicant information, with four-year histories for comparison. It even turned a daunting three-hour weekly progress meeting for Financial Aid leaders into a quick one-hour update.
The Student Record Overview combines more than 10 Banner by Ellucian forms into a single DataBlock, cutting the time everyone spent hunting for the correct report down to zero. Argos is now the hub for all financial aid operations.
“The summary reports we’ve created in Argos have been invaluable for our department. Reports like, ‘Financial Aid Year in Review’ and ‘Financial Aid History’ are accessed frequently and put financial aid data at our fingertips.”
Stephanie Bogard Trapp · Director of Financial Aid
| Before | With Argos |
|---|---|
| Most reports came from one person’s ad hoc queries | Staff build reports, DataBlocks, and dashboards in house |
| As many as 19 separate reports for one administrator | Consolidated into single Argos DataBlocks |
| A daunting three-hour weekly progress meeting | A quick one-hour update from the Financial Aid Dashboard |
| Hunting across more than 10 Banner forms | One Student Record Overview DataBlock |
“
Argos is the tool of choice. It has immediately changed the way we work, in that it has consolidated data so staff don’t have to do hours of compilation any longer, and everybody’s looking at the same information.
Jessica Ashbrook · Business Analyst, Financial Aid Office, Lansing Community College
03
The results
240 hours back, 70 percent fewer errors
With Argos deployed in nearly every department at LCC, a staggering number of employee hours is being saved.
Departments used to spend hours every term gathering employee contact information and schedules into Excel spreadsheets, and that information wasn’t always updated in Banner. LCC estimated those lists ate up 240 hours of staff time a year.
An employee contact information report not only saved those hours but improved employee data integrity, decreasing errors by an estimated 70 percent. With everyone accessing data from the same source, there are no more rogue spreadsheets, conflicting information, or hours wasted on compilation and research.
240 hours a year
Saved by replacing spreadsheet employee lists with a single report.
70 percent fewer errors
The estimated improvement in employee data integrity.
About 1,200 reports
Enterprise reports across departments, as of 2015.
400+ active users
Making Argos invaluable to day-to-day operations.
The information in Banner is LCC’s source of truth, and Argos is the solution that makes that possible.
“
Argos presents the questions users need to answer to get specific about what they are looking for. People are not only getting the information they need, but they’re learning how to think about data as well.
Jon King
Business Intelligence Analyst, Center for Data Science
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