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Enterprise Planning Solution at Long Beach City College |
The Business:
Located in Long Beach, CA Long Beach City College is the premier community college in the Southern California region. LBCC is comprised of nine schools that encompass 34 (departments? Academic orgs is a PeopleSoft term) academic organizations with over 4000. class combinations that students can choose to enroll. LBCC is comprised of two main campuses and many satellite sites.
The Challenge:
Long Beach City College consists of multiple locations, schools, academic (departments?) organizations and a large number of classes offered by each. Enrollment Management is a key process to assist the college in planning for and managing varying enrollment scenarios. Their schedule development strategies provide guidance for the coordination, recruitment, retention, service to students and other aspects of the college. LBCC currently uses People Soft to manage their HR, Student Records and Financials. Planning and budgeting for enrollment management was handled entirely through a manual spreadsheet environment. This spreadsheet-based planning was extremely cumbersome. Version control and accuracy issues impeded productive collaboration and effective oversight. Lack of reporting, continuity, and standard practices led to errors and made the Enrollment Management process long and arduous, resulting in low ownership and accountability. End user reporting using its current reporting tools was slow and not user-friendly, requiring a specialized group of analysts to extract and compile information on an ad-hoc basis and develop reports. Enrollment Management budgeting and planning was taking up to 3 months to compile, consolidate and implement.
The Vision:
To develop an Enterprise Planning solution using Cognos EPM applications and Cognos BI to provide LBCC with a tool to effectively manage enrollment management, planning and budgeting. This will enable users to use Cognos EPM and reporting and analysis without additional work for specialized IT Personnel and put an end to the difficult challenge LBCC was encountering managing this effort through extensive human effort using Excel.
The Solution:
Beginning in January 2007, under Phase 1, a web based EPM solution was implemented using Cognos Enterprise Planning software. The Enrollment Management model requires very little input from the user yet returns a great deal of information for their effort. Each user has only one tab that requires input, the Enrollment Entry tab. This tab allows contributors to add or drop classes, assign staff with differential cost considerations, and set expected enrollments based on history, recruitment, and retention efforts to meet targets set by management. This allows more time for true enrollment analysis instead of constant revisions to outdated spreadsheets. Contributors see results versus targets in real time and can make adjustments and see the results in real time. The implementation of Phase 2 will include dashboards and key analytical reports for management.
The Results:
This solution delivered real time data collection, consolidation, workflow, and calculations that enabled users to make better and quicker decisions. Flexible and powerful model development with the Cognos Analyst component supports any business planning or customizing of the Enrollment Management model.
Contributors have accountability and ownership of their enrollment forecast. The solution decreased the amount of time to process, consolidate and implement forecasts. It provided real time service cost and expense planning per semester.
The Tools:
PeopleSoft, Cognos Enterprise Planning, Cognos 8 BI, SQL 2005 Client, Windows 2003 Server, Sun One Directory Server.
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