The University of Minnesota has successfully implemented business intelligence from Cognos. With a student body of more than 65 000, Cognos has been chosen to process the large quantities of student, financial, human resource, scheduling and academic data.
"Our higher education customers have unique challenges ahead of them and they rely on business intelligence solutions from Cognos to deliver the information they need to meet those challenges," says Ben Plummer, Cognos vice president of marketing. "By gaining a unified view of the organisation, reducing IT obligations, and streamlining business processes, Cognos solutions enables companies to have maximum impact with minimal use of resources."
The university is now able to use the data warehouse and Cognos solutions to complement the existing PeopleSoft functionality, ease the burden on the transaction systems and streamline business processes.
"We`re now using Cognos to create a large number of reports - used in registration permissions, human resource tracking, payroll monitoring, and collegiate class lists - in a fraction of the time," says Susan Grotevant, director of information management at the University.
Information is vital for tracking and analysing research grants and for overall budget management. Some reports which used to take over 30 hours to create, can now be created in minutes by end-users at their desktops. In addition, users need only minimal training, keeping developers focused on more technical matters.
"Since we started offering reporting and analysis through Cognos, our user base has grown from 300 to almost 6 000 - in less than two years. We`re building our new reports in about one-tenth of this time it used to take. There is no question that this has been an excellent investment," concludes Grotevant.
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The University of Minnesota is one of the most comprehensive universities and consistently ranks among the top 20 universities in the US. This Big Ten institution prides itself on the quality of its academics, the scholarship of its faculty, its contributions to the region`s artistic and cultural richness, its breakthroughs in research, and its world-class facilities.
Having the size and complexity of a major enterprise with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and expenses, far-flung operations in dozens of counties, and thousands of employees, the university increasingly relies on vast quantities of student, financial, human resources, and facilities management data to support its strategic, operational and management information needs.
Cognos
Cognos is the world`s largest and most successful vendor of enterprise business intelligence solutions that leverage Internet technology to make information easily accessible to everyone in your enterprise.
Founded in 1969, Cognos does business in more than 120 countries and employs 2 600 people worldwide. With more than 2 million BI licences in over 16 000 organisations worldwide, Cognos solutions are licensed for use by a wide range of customers, including Global 3000 corporations.
Our business intelligence solutions and services are sold directly and are also available from more than 3 000 worldwide partners and resellers and supported by an experienced field force of more than 1 400 customer-facing personnel. For more information visit: http://www.cognos.com
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