Business & Administrative | News

Kennesaw State U Adds Business Intelligence Software To Manage Growth

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 11/13/13

Kennesaw State University has adopted a business intelligence suite to streamline human resources processes and improve decision making to keep up with rapid growth.

"We needed a single solution that made it possible for us tie together all of our various sources of data and information," said Brad Smith, director of payroll services and human resource information systems at Kennesaw State, in a prepared statement. "We wanted something that was easy to administer and enabled us to deliver data and data analysis tools to users' desktops. Toad Business Intelligence Suite gave us all of that and more."

The school decided to adopt Dell's Toad Business Intelligence Suite. "The suite includes Toad Intelligence Central," according to a news release, "which allows users to combine data across multiple sources, locations, and formats and then collaborate on logical data views through two desktop tools: Toad Data Point for analytic data provisioners and Toad Decision Point for business analysts."

Since adopting the software, Kennesaw State has reduced the time HR personel spend correcting reporting errors by 20 hours each week and has gone from generating 12 automated reports each year to delivering 50 reports in less than two months.

The new software has also made it possible for non-technical personel, such as the provost or academic affairs officers, to "pull reports featuring years of enrollment, tuition, attendance, and expense data to further aid decision-making," according to a news release. "This has proven particularly useful during the summer session, when it's critical for the university to proactively predict whether classes will incur cost, break even, or be profitable."

"For three years, I've manually created reports for the provost and academic affairs officers, but now I'm able to put that data into Toad Intelligence Central and give them the ability to pull reports themselves — much earlier than before," said Smith, in a prepared statement. "Toad BI Suite will enable them to be more proactive in their planning."

Located northwest of Atlanta, Kennesaw State is the third-largest university in Georgia. It has seen rapid growth in recent years, from approximately 20,600 undergraduate and graduate students in 2007 to 24,600 in 2012. More information about Kennesaw State University is available at kennesaw.edu.

More about the Toad Business Intelligence Suite is available here.