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SunGard Higher Ed BI App Drills into Retention Data

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/27/11

SunGard Higher Education has launched a new business intelligence product in its Banner line specifically to help institutional customers analyze and report on the results of their retention programs. Banner Student Retention Performance is a set of scorecards, dashboards, reports, and analytic features for monitoring retention progress across the entire school, by program, or by student cohort.

The new application pulls data from Banner Student and Banner Relationship Management, the latter a CRM program to manage student engagement activities.

Scorecards within the student retention program display configurable key performance indicators to measure retention goals against objectives. The application comes with pre-packaged trend and summary reports to assist users in identifying success factors in data related to academic, demographic, financial, engagement, and other areas.

The company is also offering consulting and training services to accelerate implementation within client sites.

One college that has tried the new application is Florida Keys Community College, with about 2,000 students. "Banner Student Retention Performance gives our administrators robust reporting and analytical tools to make important, data-driven decisions," said Bryan Gilchrist, director of IT. "Improving academic programs and student success initiatives is a priority for us. At the same time, we need to be as efficient as possible due to our limited resources."

Florida Keys is using the program to study student retention trends across programs and more easily measure student performance outcomes.

"Making informed and strategic decisions to improve academic programs and student success initiatives can be difficult, particularly when responsibility for student success is spread across an institution and resources are limited," said Mark Zimmerman, SunGard HE's vice president of product management and strategy. "Banner Student Retention Performance helps distribute the information out through the campus, and provides data access for a full 360 degree analysis."

The company also offers Course Signals, a program that provides early warning information to help colleges and universities identify at-risk students.