Business Objects Helps Improve Financial and Operational Performance for Leading Colleges and Universities

Business Wire, Oct 19, 2005

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Business Objects Helps Leading Universities Improve Efficiency, Manage Alumni Development Programs, and Develop Enrollment Strategies

As budgets in higher education become tighter, the leading colleges and universities increasingly turn to Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ) (Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, to manage operations more efficiently and improve performance. Top educational institutions depend on Business Objects to more effectively manage alumni development programs, develop student retention strategies, and provide administrators and faculty with easy access to actionable data. Some of those universities include Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, Columbia University, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Stanford University, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Vanderbilt University.

"Business Objects knows that colleges and universities are under more pressure and public scrutiny regarding their financial operations, student performance, and admissions process," said Jay Johnson, vice president of government at Business Objects. "With Business Objects, administrators and faculty members get immediate access to data that helps them enrich academic programs, improve student retention, gain visibility into their finances, and enhance communication amongst the various university departments. Business Objects gives decision makers trusted information they can use to improve academic programs and student services throughout the institution."

Customer deployments include:

Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University has standardized on Business Objects. The Cleveland-based university selected Business Objects to track, understand, and manage performance across multiple operational areas including student administration, HR, and finance. Business Objects will enable the university to provide administrators with self-service access to data, making it easy for them to find and analyze the information they need.

"We chose Business Objects because the company offers the most full-featured, mature products with extremely flexible reporting," said Jim Prince, the Data Warehouse Project Manager at Case Western Reserve University. "More important, at every stage in our evaluation process Business Objects was ranked number one overall for features, performance, and ease of use. Our first implementation in the area of student administration has validated our selection of Business Objects to provide vital information to users at every level of experience."

Universite du Quebec a Montreal

Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM) offers a wide range of programs to approximately 40,000 undergraduate, graduate, and research students. UQAM closely monitors and tracks the lifecycle of each of its 40,000 annually enrolled students from initial application to graduation. UQAM was using many independent systems to maintain student data, resulting in inconsistent results. Furthermore, hundreds of employees -- ranging from administrators to program directors -- required a single coherent view of data in order to understand trends and plan accordingly.

"Thanks to Business Objects, hundreds of university employees have easy web-access to student data. Finally, we can access data that we desperately needed to see -- and we can get it faster than ever before," said Lise Carriere, Director, Institutional Research, Universite du Quebec a Montreal. "Today, employees can proactively plan new programs, address enrollment or attrition rates, and create strategies to further ensure student success. Also, in the future, they will have the possibility of combining student data with research data, which includes professor's grants and human resources data, allowing them to look into financial support for students. At the end of the development phases, all data contained in the operational systems will be linked into the data warehouse -- giving end users a better grasp of what is really happening at the university. Finally UQAM will soon be using performance manager to implement and follow the implementation of the institutional strategic plan."

University of Illinois

One of the largest research universities in the U.S., the University of Illinois has deployed business intelligence from Business Objects widely across the school to provide a central resource for up-to-date standard reports, as well as access to data for custom reports related to enrollment, retention and success of students, financial status, and information on grant programs.

"Our Business Objects deployment serves the diverse needs of our complex organization, from tracking recruitment, retention and success of students, to managing the financial status and performance of the university," said Andrea Ballinger, Director, Data Warehousing, Decision Support, University of Illinois. "For users such as data analysts and institutional researchers producing campus level statistics, to front-line staff working directly with students and faculty, the business intelligence solution from Business Objects is key to making information widely accessible by colleges and departments."