Our client, a US university, collects data from various sources for several of its schools of study. The data includes information about students, clinical sites, faculty, and employment opportunities. The amount of data was overwhelming and not always accessible between campuses. Our client needed a system to provide for the production of centralized data across the school’s major programs and campuses.
Managing data was the biggest challenge for our client and the situation was compounded with key constituents including department and administrative staff, and external parties needing and receiving the right data on a timely basis over a wide geographic area. Intone’s experienced data analytics professionals performed an in-depth ‘as-is’ analysis of our client’s workflows, processes, and compliance requirements. Maintaining real-time accurate, non-redundant data through various inputting, updating, and tracking processes and procedures made a reliable analysis of a large amount of data not possible in their current state.
We focused our design and integration plan development on our client’s need for better utilization of available methods and resources across the university systems to improve enrollment levels, financial planning, and forecasting of data and operational results to increase the efficient and effective delivery of a competitive curriculum using innovative techniques (i.e. Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, etc.).
By analyzing the current state of our client’s wide-ranging academic programs and business processes, we developed roadmaps and detailed plans for process enhancements and for the data analytics solution selection. We assisted our client to select Microsoft Dynamics®CRM. This application is designed to be compatible and completely integrate with the university’s current ERP application, Microsoft Dynamics 365. Multiple data types with different purposes populated the university’s datamarts; student-specific data relating to application, enrollment, tuition financing, academic process as well as information about professors and faculty, off-campus learning sites, facilities information, clinical sites, and departmental back-office operations.
All of these data sources were incorporated within our analysis and platform development enabling a more integrated data platform to enable timely university decision-making in multiple impactful areas. With seamless data integration, multiple staff members in different geographic locations could now enter information once and access that information in real-time.
Intone incorporated innovative thought processes to design the data integration and analytics methodologies maximizing the visualizations, dashboards, reports, and ad hoc query capabilities of the university’s new data management solution Microsoft Dynamics®CRM. Through professional collaboration between the client’s IT lead and Intone’s PMO, Intone provided for innovative business and process control analysts; IT architecture, IT integration, quality assurance and testing experts for this engagement, Our engagement efforts providing for a much more simplified and cost-effective student recruiting, tracking, and self-assessment process through customization using all the tools available in Microsoft Dynamics.
Intone also provided for “Expert’ training teams and support resources to all facilities which ensured process sustainability for the new cutting edge data analytics platform to better serve current students, faculty, and administrators and to recruit new students and expand the university’s reach through on campus, satellite sites, or digital online learning.