Reporting practices made seamless across campus with Argos

For many years, IVC used Microsoft Access as its database and Ellucian Banner for baseline reports. These options felt limited when it came to design and format. The college needed a true reporting solution.

Distributing reports manually was both inefficient and time consuming. Ultimately, IVC was restricted by what was available to it and chose to see what else it could do.

Argos is now used daily by departments such as HR, Finance, Financial Aid, Instruction, Business Office, and Student Success. The enterprise licensing model let IVC give every full-time employee, and many part-time employees, an Argos account. That was vital: almost every employee at IVC uses Argos at least once, if not on a regular basis.

Argos’s Scheduling & Delivery feature has helped IVC overcome the pain of manually generating reports and distributing them to a list of people. Banded reports such as the Faculty Load Report are now generated and emailed automatically every day, as are the CSV files one of the college’s third-party systems requires.

Though Argos has many functions and elaborate capabilities, the system is easy to learn. IVC’s Senior Programmer/Systems Analyst in IT Application Services went from knowing absolutely nothing to creating complex reports in a couple of weeks, after watching the recorded online training sessions.

IVC has also used the Evisions CO-OP to get ideas from other institutions: to see what other Argos users are doing, how they’re doing it, and to avoid reinventing the wheel if a solution is already out there.

IVC uses Argos as an electronic input form, like an application, to collect input from the user and push that data into the database. That has let the college build electronic multi-approval requests: Leave Requests, Change of Program for students, Abbreviated EdPlan, Graduation Application, the Administrators Interactive Service Days Calendar, Medical Benefits Change, and Part Time Office Hour.

Users can create reports in a matter of hours or days, depending on complexity, to make data-driven decisions. For the end user, that means access to data from different departments on demand.

Over time, IVC has seen Evisions continue to improve Argos’s features and functionality, almost always based on client feedback. To the college, that is a sign that Evisions has its reporting success in mind, and it is why IVC continues to choose Argos.