Public Universities
A whole university answering its own questions
Deans, department chairs, advisors, and the business office run their own reports on definitions your central team controls. The state submission, the provost's dashboard, and the plain-language question a dean asks all start from the same governed data.
Trusted by public universities across the United States
The situation
Many colleges, one central data team
A public university is many organizations under one name: colleges, departments, and administrative offices, each with its own questions and its own deadlines, all depending on one ERP and a central team that serves every one of them.
01
Every college keeps its own version of the numbers
Each dean's office builds its own enrollment and credit-hour spreadsheet. In the budget meeting the figures disagree, and the first half hour goes to working out whose is right.
02
The central team turns into a queue
Institutional research and enterprise applications field requests from dozens of units. A department's data pull waits behind the state submission, and the department learns to stop asking.
03
Accountability reporting keeps growing
System office submissions, state performance funding, IPEDS, accreditation, and the strategic plan each want the same measures in a different format, on a different deadline.
04
At this scale, every manual step multiplies
Bills, tax statements, award letters, and transcripts go out by the tens of thousands. A step that takes one minute per student becomes weeks of staff time every term.
Governed self-service
Every college runs its own reports on your definitions
Argos separates who writes the query from who runs the report. Your central team owns the logic, the definitions, and the permissions. Colleges, departments, and offices select parameters, filter, schedule, and export without seeing a schema or holding a database credential.
At Texas A&M, more than 240 Argos users across colleges and departments work this way, and together they have built roughly 40,000 DataBlocks. Missouri State paired the Banner Operational Data Store with Argos and rolled self-service reporting out across campus in less than a year.
- Views built for each college, department, and office, each permissioned to the people in that role
- Unlimited users under the institutional license, with no ERP seat or login required
- Experienced users add their own SQL; everyone else works from the visual designer
- Scheduled delivery, so the department's list arrives instead of being requested
- Community-shared objects through the CO-OP community, so a new college starts from something
“We needed to improve our ability to produce ad hoc reports including dashboards for decision-makers. We wanted to empower our staff to easily generate any report that they needed to service our university and students.”
Theresa McCoy · Coordinator of Management Information Systems · Missouri State University
Argos X
Plain-language answers, with student data kept inside
Once self-service reaches hundreds of people, the next question is how a dean or a department leader explores data without learning the schema. The tempting shortcut is to paste student data into an outside AI tool, which moves it beyond the university's governed environment.
Argos Data Agent answers a plain-language question against the DataBlocks your team enables, under the permissions already set there, and shows the SQL so the answer can be checked before it travels. Texas A&M gave its trained Argos users a conversational way to explore governed student data for exactly this reason.
- Argos Data Agent for plain-language questions, with the SQL visible
- Pivot Mode and Explore Data for reshaping and exporting without a new request
- Answers grounded in governed objects and existing permissions, not an uploaded spreadsheet
- Zero Data Retention, with masking and redaction available on sensitive fields
- Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost
- Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers
“I don't expect the president of A&M to be a SQL Developer. But if she had access to this, she could ask how many students are under a 3.0 and get a graph broken down.”
Josh Radnitzer · IT Manager IV, Enterprise Information Systems · Texas A&M University
Performance and accountability
Strategic plan measures, run the same way every year
A strategic plan is a list of measures somebody has to produce, every year, for the board, the system office, and the campus. Argos stores each definition as an object, so retention, completion, and credit-hour measures run the same way next year as this year, and the dashboard and the state extract read from the same definition.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock built the KPIs behind its "Fast Forward" strategic plan as Argos dashboards and OLAP data cubes, giving users and executives direct access to the numbers and the data underneath them.
- KPI dashboards for the president's cabinet, built once and opened live
- Retention, completion, and cohort definitions saved once and reproduced in a future year
- Fixed-width and delimited extracts for system office, state, and IPEDS submissions
- Stop-out and re-enrollment lists for the retention teams that act on them
- Delivered to the provost's office on a schedule, not assembled the week before
“The Argos OLAP Data Cubes gave us a multi dimensional view of the University's data including enrollment and grant information. With Argos it was easy to chart or slice and dice this information.”
Megan Weatherford · Business Analyst · University of Arkansas at Little Rock
FormFusion
Bills, tax statements, and transcripts at university volume
Every term the bursar, financial aid, and the registrar send documents to every student they serve: bills, revised award letters, 1098-T statements, transcripts. At a public university's enrollment, paper and postage become a budget line and a deadline risk.
FormFusion takes the output of a job your ERP already runs, adds the fields the baseline template cannot carry, applies your branding, and delivers it to the student portal, encrypted email, or your imaging system. Southern Illinois University moved 26,000 tuition bills from paper to PDF and brought 1098-T production in-house; the University of Wyoming now delivers up to 10,000 bills a month as PDFs.
- Student bills delivered as PDFs through self-service, with an email alert
- 1098-T statements produced in-house instead of by a contractor
- Award letters and revision notices with the fields the baseline template cannot carry
- Transcripts built to your state's requirements with Evisions
- Documents fed straight into imaging or a network folder, removing the print, scan, and index cycle
- FormFusion does not require Argos; each reads your ERP directly and neither depends on the other
“In the first year after implementation, we saved over $88,000 in printing costs and postage alone, which made our school administration very happy. We saw reduced personnel time necessary to process our bills.”
Jill Kirkpatrick · Bursar · Southern Illinois University
One set of numbers for the whole university
See how a central team serves every college and office without becoming the queue. See it in a demo.
In their words
Public universities, at scale
Public universities running Argos, Argos Data Agent, and FormFusion in production, from universities of about 12,000 students to one of more than 80,000.
Outcome
240 trained Argos users explore governed student data in conversation, without exporting it to outside AI tools.
“
Argos empowered us to take full control of the process. We didn't have to wait on IT or outside help, and the results came faster than anyone expected.
Bob Griffith, Sr. Data Analyst
Oakland University
Data analysis team
Stop Out reporting rebuilt in Argos: a query that ran for more than 20 minutes now returns in under 30 seconds.
Outcome
More than 40 Banner jobs replaced, and a week-long Pell Grant process now takes under an hour.
Outcome
Up to 10,000 student bills a month delivered as PDFs, saving about $45,000 a year.
Related
The same data serves every office on campus
Institutional Research
State, system, and IPEDS submissions on cohort definitions that reproduce.
Financial Aid
Pell reconciliation, award letters, and the jobs that used to run one at a time.
Finance and Business Office
Student bills, 1098-T statements, and budget dashboards by college.
IT
One governed layer for hundreds of report users, and the security review behind it.
How it fits
Where this sits relative to what you already run
With your ERP and data store
Your ERP stays the system of record. Argos reads it directly, or an operational data store or warehouse you already run, through governed objects, and FormFusion produces the documents your ERP jobs generate. Neither replaces what you have.
With Ellucian Insights
Insights aggregates data across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos works directly against your own environment, covering dashboards through Dashboard Designer, conversational analysis through Argos Data Agent, compliance output, and scheduled delivery, on definitions your team controls. Most institutions run both.
Versus your current process
Today each college rebuilds its own numbers, the central team works through a request queue, and the strategic plan's measures are assembled by hand every spring. The data is already in your systems; the work is in how it is routed.
Trust and security
You take security seriously. So do we.
The Trust Center is published and the HECVAT is available on request, so a reviewer can start before anyone schedules a call.
Permissions are enforced, never overridden
A report cannot be opened by someone your team has not permissioned to run it. College, department, and office views are built for the role that needs them and granted to that role.
Authentication
LDAP group sync and SAML SSO configured once at the MAPS layer, with permission tiers set per product in the same place, by the same team.
AI governance
Argos Data Agent is built on Argos and reads only the DataBlocks you enable, under the permissions already set there. Sensitive columns can be masked or redacted for everyone who uses it, and institutional data is not retained by Evisions or the model provider.
Production performance
Query queuing and priority keep reporting load from competing with registration during peak.
Data handling
FERPA-aligned practices, encryption in transit, and AES-encrypted password-protected document delivery. For Argos Data Agent, masking or redaction of sensitive fields.
Documentation
Trust Center, and a HECVAT (the standard higher education security questionnaire) on request.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked first
Can each college have its own reports without its own copy of the data?
Yes. Your central team builds the object once and grants each college, department, or office the view it needs. Everyone runs the same definition, filtered to what they are permissioned to see.
We have hundreds of people who want reports. Does licensing scale with them?
Licensing is per institution with unlimited users, and report access does not require an ERP seat. Adding a department means granting access, not buying licenses.
Can Argos report from our operational data store or warehouse?
Yes. Argos connects to the ERP directly or to a reporting store you already run, such as an operational data store, and the same objects and permissions apply either way.
Does this help with state and system office submissions?
Argos produces the formatted output those submissions require and delivers it on a schedule. The submission itself remains yours.
What happens to student data when someone uses Data Agent?
Argos Data Agent operates under Zero Data Retention, honors existing permissions, and supports masking and redaction. It runs against governed objects instead of the raw database.
What is included with Argos, and what is licensed separately?
Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost. Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers.
Do we need Argos to use FormFusion?
No. They are separate products doing separate jobs, and each reads your ERP directly. Universities that run both use each for what it is built for: Argos to answer questions against your data, FormFusion to turn ERP output into the finished document.
Is there anything we can start from instead of building it all?
Yes. The CO-OP community shares reporting objects across institutions, and Starter Packs ship pre-built objects across Student, Finance, Financial Aid, HR, and Advancement.
How does this coexist with Ellucian Insights?
Insights aggregates across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos runs against your own environment on your team's definitions. Most institutions run both.
How long does implementation take?
It depends on how much you want live on day one. Professional Services scopes it with you. The people doing that scoping ran campus IT and institutional reporting before they worked here.
What does it cost, and can we talk to one like us?
Licensing is per institution rather than per user, and price is driven by institution size and product mix rather than headcount. Argos, Argos X, FormFusion, and IntelleCheck all carry unlimited users and unlimited connections, with no per-connection or per-report charge and nothing billed for people who only read reports. The one exception is Argos Data Agent Advanced, which is licensed per seat. Data Agent Core is unlimited. Tell us your FTE and which products you are weighing and we will give you a real figure on the first call, then put you in touch with an institution of roughly your size and ERP. Ask them about support while you are there. It is in-house, and it is the thing customers raise unprompted more than anything else.
Next step
A university that answers for itself
Get a demo and see every college and office run its own reports on the definitions your central team sets.
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