Pennsylvania State University needed a partner to help them establish a firm foundation in modern analytics throughout the university.
Penn State is a top-ranked research university founded with a mission of high-quality teaching, expert research and global service. When the Institutional Research division adopted Power BI, other departments across the university quickly noticed as they realized the transformative power of the insights delivered. 3Cloud worked with other divisions – Office of the Corporate Controller (OCC), Auxiliary & Business Services (A&BS) – to help them adopt Power BI as they were not able to answer critical business questions without significant time investment from IT and operational resources. For example, A&BS could not easily determine where student housing contracts stood day-to-day. Their current process consisted of daily manual entry into spreadsheets with varied counting methods and entry times. The OCC was working with inflexible legacy systems that made it difficult to derive a comprehensive solution. The financial services team sought to implement a modern analytics platform that would achieve the university’s financial goals and boost constituent’s clarity and productivity. In addition, the Housing, Food Service and Residence Life Team faced challenges of managing data in many disparate systems. With 12 campuses and 90K students, data plays a critical role in delivering streamlined, cost-efficient and effective services.
“This is the insight into a lot of data that we’ve been struggling to make business decisions around easily. Your (3Cloud) insight has helped us set up an environment that is solid going forward, and we won’t look back wishing we would’ve done something different. Your expertise has been awesome!”
3Cloud DEVELOPED a Power BI solution and reports based around a new data model.
The Power BI solution that 3Cloud developed for the OCC was a time-sensitive reconciliation process and report that would meet compliance. To enable fiscal integrity and self-service, a solution was created for a secure purchasing card inventory for all university financial officers to help solve the issue of accounting for and tracking the 10,000 active employee purchase cards when employee statuses or card limits changed. For Penn State A&BS, 3Cloud built a Power BI data model focused on student housing contracts and related student and residency attributes. Using this new data model, reports were created to allow analysts to monitor and compare housing contracts for current and previous terms, and also to inventory residence applications for upcoming terms using the same attributes. For the Food Service analysts, working with Excel was a pain point as they deal with millions of transaction records annually. 3Cloud developed a report built upon the student data model which incorporates point of sales transactions from a separate system.
In addition, to enable teams to understand Power BI’s technical and administrative components, 3Cloud conducted training workshops covering Power BI Admin and Power BI fundamentals to ensure data modelers, report developers and analysts are equipped with the Power BI skills they need, promoting long term adoption success. Kim Thorpe, Programmer/Analyst, Penn State remarked, “I have gained a lot of knowledge about row-level security, data modeling, visuals and DAX. I have learned a ton and am already sailing along with my own reports.”
The custom Power BI solution that 3Cloud provided for Penn State’s OCC and A&BS divisions empowers them with new insights from their data. The solution gives financial officers the ability to ingest current and historical purchase card inventory insights. Row-level security also enables the finance and controller’s offices with access to manage the catalog at each business and organizational level. This reduced the time the OCC spent manually tracking purchase cards while encouraging site-wide Power BI adoption among all financial officers. For the A&BS division, the build of a new data model and reports gives them insight into trends and decisions of students interested in living on campus over time, with the ability to compare applications for an upcoming term against prior years. For Food Service analysts, incorporating data into Power BI allows them to review and compare multiple years’ worth of point-of-sale data married to student housing and demographic information. These modern analytics insights for the divisions were impossible prior to their Power BI deployment. The data and analytics capabilities will provide leadership with fast, reliable decision support.
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