4-page Case Study - Posted 5/1/2006
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Capella University Monitors Growth with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Business Challenge
Successful universities are ultimately driven by student enrollment rates. Moreover, it is commonly the valuable information locked inside enrollment data that holds the key to successful marketing tactics and improved revenue. Recognizing this, Capella University’s executive management team launched an initiative to improve the organization’s use of its data resources in order to better manage the performance of the university.
As the university’s data warehousing project took shape, the business side of the organization established an enterprise-wide agreement on key performance indicators (KPIs). Once these metrics were identified, and as the data warehousing initiative took shape, the IT organization quickly realized they lacked the proper toolset to easily display these KPIs to the university’s decision makers. “We had been using a standard reporting tool that required a lot of IT intervention to help users understand the relational database model,” said Karl Lacher, manager of business intelligence for Capella University. “What we really needed was a presentation component that would permit the end users to quickly and easily understand student enrollment trends, without requiring too much IT involvement, which would allow them to make better forecasts for upcoming quarters.”
Capella’s Business Intelligence team first considered web components as a front-end solution; however it was quickly decided that they simply did not have the resources to develop adequate tools. As such, the organization began the search for an out-of-the-box front-end solution to their dimensionally modeled data warehouse hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000.
Several vendors were evaluated, but ultimately ease of scalability, favorable licensing model and a positive overall customer service experience led Capella to select Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. “They had a technical sales person on site who basically installed Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on our server within one hour, hooked directly to the cubes we had built, and were able to provide us with a working demo that same afternoon,” said Lacher. “We kept ‘kicking tires’ on other products, but in the end Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 offered a lot better customer service and superior tools making them the clear front-runner.”
Solution
Capella had been using another vendor’s OLAP client as their corporate reporting tool which, according to Lacher, required a lot of IT intervention to help end-users understand the relational database model. The university’s first step toward a more successful BI initiative was to move all of its operational data to a SQL Server database. Utilizing Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server, the IT department could now more easily put data into a cube format that provides a powerful mechanism to display hierarchies and relationships to end users, completely freeing the business side of the organization from the back-end data formatting process.
According to Lacher, the Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 implementation was relatively painless and very little training was required to get users up and running. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 was installed in just four days and power users were trained to use Office PerformancePoint Server Professional 2007 in a three-day training course. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 also facilitated the company’s initial dashboard project enabling the IT department to meet a rapidly closing deadline.
The flexibility of the Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 allows IT to tailor the delivery of data according to unique user needs across several departments including admissions, marketing, finance and individual educational departments. Casual users are provided with static views of data delivered primarily with Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Approximately 20 business analysts use the Office PerformancePoint Server Professional 2007 robust “slice and dice” capabilities to perform deep root-cause analysis of the data. Capella’s executive team relies primarily on Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 dashboards and enhanced charting capabilities to display high-level KPI information allowing them to better monitor the performance of the university.
Business Benefits]
Smart decisions – improved productivity
The Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 has significantly improved Capella’s access to information, providing a solid foundation for better decision making across the organization. According to Lacher, the overall business experience has been very positive: “Once users get these cubes with Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 sitting on top as the analytic tool they just go nuts.”
Capella University is still in the early stages of harnessing the quantitative results from the initiative but they anticipate it will play a significant role in strategic planning going forward.
It is apparent that Capella University is just scratching the surface of its BI initiative, yet the organization is already in the process of migrating to SQL Server 2005 and the newest release of Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.
“In SQL Server 2005, the more encompassing cube structures with multiple hierarchies provide a fundamental change in the way our data can be structured and consumed,” says Lacher. “We expect to see significant performance and scalability enhancements by leveraging Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 on top of the superior BI features in SQL Server 2005.”
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office.
For more information about Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, go to:
www.microsoft.com/performancepoint.
© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft and the Office logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Document published May 2006
