Griffith University
Cortell challenged and questioned why we do certain things certain ways
Griffith University is a leading higher education provider servicing South East Queensland from its five campuses based in Nathan, Logan, The Gold Coast, Mt Gravatt and South Bank.
Established in 1971 Griffith has experienced rapid growth and development over the 40 years since inception and today accommodates in excess of 40,000 students, on site, at any one time taking one or more of the 300 programs on offer.
Within the prestigious QS World University Rankings Griffith places in the top 5% of universities in the world.
Challenge
Managing the student load forecasting, cost management and consequential financial implications at Griffith was at times a very manual and labour intensive process, something Stuart Jones, Deputy Director, Planning and Financial Services at the University sought to improve.
“The current processes placed heavy burdens on certain individuals to manage and maintain. The processes were slow, difficult to change and certainly difficult to integrate, end to end. The university was very reliant on the skills of a select few and a heavy Excel based framework to support its core financial and student modelling environment”
The university also ran a centralized Data warehouse and an activity based costing solution built on an Oracle and SAS platform. The Data warehouse captured information relevant to the operational aspects of the student but didn’t provide the flexibility and dynamic modeling capability required to capture, consolidate, forecast and model student load plans and subsequent financial metrics.
Further to this the activity based costing module was too difficult to maintain and ideally needed to be integrated to the student and financial planning models.
The Cortell Solution
Griffith went to market to review all the tools available that could provide the flexibility and platform requirements needed to support multiple applications. After an extensive review they selected TM1 and Cortell Australia as the solutions provider to assist on this journey.
“TM1 provided the platform we were looking for, one application layer that could handle the intricate challenges education institutions provide whilst integrating key aspects of the university, without the huge overheads associated with maintaining it”
Cortell helped build a very sophisticated fully automated student load and planning model that now provides Stuart and his team the insight and ‘what if’ capability needed to keep track of the student volumes, course allocations, international origins, grants, graduations etc. The student load model also includes the financial aspects associated with the university and supports the budget, forecast and planning process.
Post implementation of the student load and forecast planning system, Stuart wanted to take the integration further and drive the QTAC intake and submission process and change the in house activity based costing models to help support internal financial use and the SRE, Sustainable Research Excellence, processes and have them all integrated to form an operational and financial platform in TM1.
Later Cortell Australia assisted in the construction of the QTAC and SRE applications to help feed and support the analysis Stuart and his team needed to do to help provide the insight and seamless analysis required to drive effective decision making.
The university now has an end to end student planning, financial management and costing system running on a single integrated platform.
“Working with Cortell has been fantastic.Not only have we realized our objectives, we have surpassed them”
“Cortell challenged and questioned why we do certain things certain ways and made recommendations to help improve the efficiency and overall process”
"TM1 as an application is well suited to any University structure; it handles the nuances of our industry very well and accommodates change easily without impacting time and cost”
The Journey
Based on the initial successes of the IBM Cognos TM1 projects, Stuart wanted to share the content with the broader university and drive toward an enterprise information management framework.
The university needed a web based reporting and dash board centric solution to access content from the existing data warehouse and the TM1 performance management layer.
After a review of the products available in the market, Griffith University selected the IBM Cognos 10 platform for its ease of use and integration across platforms.
Cortell provided the licenses to Griffith, advised on the appropriate make up and product features and have assisted through the development process, helping the university deliver on the initial stages of the enterprise information management journey.
With the integrated IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and Performance Management analytic framework, Griffith University have been able to improve business insight, reduce manual and labour intensive processes and share the outcomes and enhanced decision making capability with a broader user community more effectively than previously possible.