eCapital Advisors Case Study: Opus College of Business
Opus College of Business gets smarter about scheduling
Increasing efficiency in higher education scheduling with IBM Cognos TM1
Smart is…
Using analytics to solve complex scheduling problems and optimize the allocation of academic resources
Business challenge
The Opus College of Business, part of the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, had a complex academic scheduling process. It frequently took more than two months for staff to finalize the schedules. In order to offer students the best possible range of courses, reduce costs and make it easier to maintain AACSB accreditation, the college needed a more efficient method of timetabling.
Solution
eCapital Advisors, an IBM® Business Partner, helped the college implement IBM Cognos® TM1® and develop a reliable and versatile course scheduling solution. TM1 collects and analyzes data from multiple sources – including SunGard’s Banner Student and DigitalMeasures’ ActivityInsight – and constructs multiple scheduling scenarios, helping the college make better, faster decisions about the allocation of teaching staff and other resources.
Business benefits
- Enables the college to run the right number of courses to meet students’ needs, potentially boosting attendance rates by 20 percent and reducing the number of poorly-attended classes.
- Enhances the college’s understanding of the factors that contribute to students’ course selections, enabling more accurate planning of demand levels across the school’s twin campuses in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
- Makes it easier to maintain AACSB accreditation by ensuring that each course is taught by professors with the appropriate academic and professional qualifications.
Smarter Education: Using scenario planning to simplify scheduling
Instrumented
Data on student enrolment, staff availability, college finances and AACSB requirements is collected and integrated by the IBM Cognos TM1 solution.
Interconnected
Users involved in the scheduling process can instantly calculate whether a given scenario will meet requirements and perform rapid iterations to reach a solution.
Intelligent
As well as accelerating the scheduling process, the system also provides greater insight into why students choose certain courses, helping to predict demand levels and eliminate under-subscribed courses.
The University of St Thomas has taught business to students for almost as long as the institution has existed; its Commercial Studies course was first offered in 1895. Today, the university’s Opus College of Business maintains its history of excellence as one of the foremost business schools in Minnesota, well-regarded for its innovative MBA programs and home to more than 3,500 undergraduate and graduate scholars at two main campuses.
In fulfilling its mission of providing an outstanding liberal arts education and developing highly principled global business leaders, the Opus College of Business sought accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a distinction held by only five percent of global business schools. To achieve this prestigious status, the college had to satisfy an exhaustive set of over 23 different criteria, including the strategic management of resources, commitment to continued improvement and achievement, and student-staff interaction.
Meeting AACSB requirements
A significant element in aligning the college with the standards for AACSB accrediation involved guaranteeing that a requisite proportion of classes would be taught by leading professors with specific academic and professional qualifications. Universities employ both full-time and adjunct professors in order to bring both academic and professional qualifications into the classroom, and to maintain an economic balance to their compensation cost structure. The sheer number of students to cater for, coupled with the wide range of different degree programs and courses available, and the need to determine the availability of full and part-time staff across two main campuses, all contributed to a logistically complex and problematic scheduling procedure before the start of each semester.
As John McCall, Chief Financial Officer, Opus College of Business, explains, “We strive to provide our students with an outstanding quality of education and, as part of this remit, we’ve committed to adhering to the guidance set out by the AACSB. One particular requirement concerns the number of academically-qualified professors who teach here, a stipulation that has always contributed to a complex scheduling process.”
In the past, this process would typically take as long as two months: the scheduling team needed to decide which courses to run at which campus, what days and times of the week they should be scheduled, and which professors would be necessary to teach them.
“With over 700 different course sections, it was a very complicated and difficult procedure to coordinate the schedules across both our St Paul campus and also our downtown Minneapolis one,” recalls McCall.
Going back to the beginning
Part of the difficulty was that the process was highly sequential: first the team would decide on how many course sections to run (based on predicted student numbers), then the courses would be scheduled and staff would be allocated, and finally the AACSB calculations would be performed. If the proposed scenario did not meet the requirements, the whole process would potentially have to start again from scratch, and it often took several iterations to reach an acceptable solution.
“This was incredibly time-inefficient. We were running multiple, complex scenarios and if we discovered at the end that they didn’t meet the AACSB criteria – for instance, in terms of the number of academically-qualified professors – we would have to begin the whole process again.”
Financial implications
In business terms – and in the context of current higher education in general – it was no longer viable to run classes that only a handful of students would attend.
“There is a serious financial consideration involved in running courses, so we need to minimize any unnecessary duplication of course sections,” McCall reveals. “We have to ensure that the right number of students attend a class for it to remain economically viable. With IBM’s solution we are now better placed to be able to make the right strategic business decisions with regard to the classes we offer.”
Finding the right partner
Searching for a solution that could bring effective, efficient scheduling, Opus College of Business turned to eCapital Advisors, an IBM Business Partner and a long-time collaborator with the school.
Jim O’Connor, Business Intelligence Architect, remembers, “We fantasized that an application might exist out there somewhere that could help us eliminate some of the manual processes involved in scheduling – but we found that what we were trying to achieve would actually be quite ground-breaking. By working with eCapital and leveraging IBM Cognos TM1 software, we were able to develop an innovative solution.”
Running multiple scenarios
IBM Cognos TM1 is a complete enterprise planning solution that typically helps businesses develop reliable, customized budgets and forecasts – but the college was attracted by its potential as a very powerful real-time scenario planning solution. By collecting and assimilating data from the college’s existing databases – through integration with Oracle, DigitalMeasures and SunGard Banner Student – Cognos TM1 helps the scheduling team create multiple scheduling scenarios, automatically calculate the AACSB requirements, make adjustments, and quickly create new iterations.
“The scenario-builder capacity of TM1 was very attractive to us because it allows you to quickly go through multiple iterations depending on different variables,” says O’Connor. “But overall, it was the competitive pricing, great functionality and its compatibility with our existing systems that convinced us. TM1 integrates well with our Banner Student application, which is absolutely ideal; it sources and analyzes data from there – and our other existing platforms – and uses this historic data to construct the forecasts.”
O’Connor reflects on the project, “We were confident that eCapital would meet our needs, and it has certainly been helpful having a reliable business partner. eCapital has been flexible and accommodating from the proof of concept through to implementation. We certainly picked the right people to work with.”
The solution is also enabling the college to gain a more comprehensive idea of why students choose course sections – illuminating the significance of factors such as the time, place and location of classes. “It’s still in the early stages,” says O’Connor. “But we’re confident this will work. There’s a very real opportunity here to increase the proportion of students in each course section by 10 to 20 percent, and this will significantly benefit the school from a financial standpoint by helping us eliminate under-attended or duplicate courses.”
Delivering business efficiencies in a higher education institution
Opus College of Business used TM1 to schedule its course offerings for the first time this academic year 2011-12. “It proved useful as a common platform for people to work on,” says John McCall. “We now have the opportunity to run scenarios three to four months in advance of the formal planning process, enabling us to understand any possible faculty issues well in advance.”
IBM’s solution has enabled the college to deliver a high-efficiency, low-cost, business-critical process that makes for a vast improvement on the old manual spreadsheet-based process.
“Of course, it will also help us to keep on-track with our AACSB accreditation requirements because we can see on a real-time basis how each department is performing,” explains O’Connor. “Essentially, it will help us to make better business decisions. For me, that is what IT – at its most effective – is all about.”
About eCapital Advisors
eCapital Advisors LLC, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, is a management consulting firm specializing in Performance Management (PM) solutions. These PM solutions include software and services designed to empower the business user with real-time budgeting, forecasting, analytics and reporting. These powerful tools provide comprehensive, real-time views of performance that facilitate decision-making to improve efficiency and increase profitability.
eCapital Advisors has certified professionals on staff that represent over 150 years of consulting and industry experience. Using a proprietary methodology, these consultants quickly assess, design and implement Enterprise Planning and Business Intelligence solutions. eCapital Advisors has a continuously growing client base of over 100 leading firms now successfully using Performance Management technologies.
To learn more about products, services and solutions from eCapital Advisors, visit: ecapitaladvisors.com
About IBM Business Analytics
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With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.
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