A decade ago, Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences realized that their financial reporting and analysis capability was being inhibited. The data required for reports and custom views of information was trapped within individual transactional systems – each of which was an “information silo” and did not “talk to” other systems. The college’s data was spread across several operational systems that are currently managing over $600 million in total assets, including revenues from operations and grants.
“At the time, management supported the construction of a data warehouse to provide a centralized view of information for all types of users,” states Thom Hadley, Director of Finance and Strategic Services. “We thought that data warehousing technology was becoming more affordable at the time, but the large data warehouse solution providers did not want to lower their prices to align with a university setting, and the smaller vendors did not really have a solution robust enough to meet the complexities of our disparate data. So, we built it ourselves on Microsoft’s SQL Server.”
While the data warehouse allowed the college to centralize data collection and storage, it could not keep-up with the pace of report requests that end-users demanded.
“We developed a very complex data warehouse that was capable of meeting almost any reporting or analysis request, but the complexity required that only highly skilled IT staff could interact with it. The requests were piling up faster than the team could respond. Essentially, we were right back where we started. Then, about three years ago, we ran into a solution provider that was starting to develop something very interesting. We continued to communicate with them as they continued to develop their solution. Last year, they showed us something drastically different.”
The college decided to implement eThority Enterprise, a self-service business intelligence software solution from eThority, Inc.
“With the data visualization, reporting, graphing, and ad hoc analysis capabilities that eThority delivered, we were able to combine disparate data from ANY source, including the data warehouse, and allow end users to gain visibility to the data, create their own reports and views, and alleviate the pressure on the IT group. The key to the success of this project was not just the technologies capabilities, it was eThority’s ability to understand our environment, and apply the unique business rules to provide all types of users with the information they need. It used to take a significant amount of time to create custom reports. For example, we built a report format to enable analysis of our academic staff’s average salaries by gender and profession. After 45 minutes, the data warehouse was still churning and we had no report. I had to stop the process as it was consuming considerable CPU resources. Now, with the eThority solution, our end-users just point and click and the report is created in a few seconds. Another benefit is that our IT staff has become managers of data instead of report writing workers. By distributing access to the data and a method for manipulating it, we have captured the power of the entire organization’s ability to think about things that IT alone could not have done.”
The college has started to measure the ROI (return on investment) that has been achieved with the project. Several accountants are required to track the financial data related to 1,100 employees and $150 million in annual revenue. Prior to implementing eThority’s business intelligence solution, the accountants were spending three weeks out of each month reconciling financial reports against 1,800 accounts. Now, the entire three-week process has been boiled down to an hour-long exercise that is almost fully automated in eThority’s reporting engine. The savings alone on eliminating the three-week process and boiling it down to an hour saved an equivalent of $600,000 per year – far more than the cost of the solution. In addition to this quantitative ROI, a qualitative benefit has been uncovered. Top executives can now access information that is not filtered or presented through someone else’s interpretation. This represents a tremendous source of ROI, and could actually be the most important benefit of the entire program.