Accessible, affordable reporting with Argos

For years, the primary reporting system combined the university’s ERP, its attendant ODS client, and SAP’s Business Objects, with rePORTAL, a web delivery and distribution system, distributing the reports. Alongside this central structure, JU had five legacy systems, from Excel and Access to manual extracts with SSIS, VBScript, and PowerShell, all seeing regular use.

Maintenance for all these systems was a perennial issue. End users lucky enough to be in one of the five offices with the appropriate product licenses still had to run reports ad hoc. For every individual report, the user had to start from scratch, manually re-entering every parameter, every time.

JU wanted a comprehensive reporting solution that would make its data easier for end users to interpret, consolidate its reporting into a single environment, and, at a reasonable cost, make reporting available to a wider selection of departments.

In that time, JU’s one IT Reporting Analyst not only migrated all of the existing reports into Argos but also built 300 custom DataBlocks, the containers Argos uses to organize data and make it available for report building. Argos pulls in data from the university’s many data sources.

Compared to the ad hoc, static reports staff were used to, Argos’ dynamic dashboards and real-time reporting interface have been an incredible improvement. End users no longer reproduce reports from scratch. They go into the relevant DataBlock and either look at real-time data on their screen or run a pre-defined report, with the click of a button.

With an enterprise license, the entire reporting system is available to unlimited users. The cost of multiple licenses had been a significant barrier to offering reporting across campus. In just one year of using Argos, JU cut $12,000 in reporting licenses as well as $25,000 in other software licenses from its budget.

At the same time, JU expanded both the scope and the availability of its institutional reports. Before Argos, only five offices had direct access to reporting. With Argos, that list has grown to 16 departments and offices across campus, and with Argos Web Viewer, users can view dashboards and reports from any browser, even on a tablet.

With dynamic dashboards, enterprise licensing, and ease of use for IT staff and end users alike, Argos has helped JU save thousands every year in licenses and staff hours, and reinvent its reporting environment.