Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson Three): Learn to Love SQL

by Brian LaPlante | Dec 28, 2018 | Higher Education, Technical

Welcome to the third and final installment of our Getting Your Banner Black Belt series. In this post, we get into the fine details of querying with SQL. This, of course, is the heart of any Banner reporting you’re doing. (As a quick note, all the examples we discuss...

Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson Two): Use Good Requirements Documents

by Brian LaPlante | Dec 28, 2018 | Higher Education, Technical

Learning the ropes of Banner reporting can be a challenging process. There is so much data to work with, so many metrics to track, and so many purposes to be served. But even if mastering such a powerful tool can feel impossible at times, I can assure you it’s not....

Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson One): Refuse to Become Overwhelmed

by Brian LaPlante | Dec 28, 2018 | Higher Education, Technical

Mastering the art of Banner reporting can be easier than you might think! While Banner is a very complex Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the first step in understanding its inner workings is to refuse to become overwhelmed by the multitudes of data that...

Best Practices for Designing OLAP Cubes

by Brian LaPlante | Nov 27, 2018 | Higher Education, Technical

For making complex data-driven decisions, you need a complex data visualization tool. Happily, OLAP (short for On-Line Analytical Processing) is fast becoming a ubiquitous method for the advanced analysis of multi-dimensional information. In Argos, our OLAP engine is...

Writing Reports with a Scheduling Mindset

by Bryan Fortriede | Oct 15, 2018 | Administration, Higher Education, Technical

There is an ever-growing need for reports to analyze the mass of data gathered by institutions.  Resources to create and execute these reports are limited. An option to reduce the manual component of processing and sending these reports is to use a scheduler to...

Steps To Higher Education Data Cleanliness: A Technical Perspective

by Jonathan Kim | May 17, 2018 | Higher Education, Technical

Introduction As data is collected daily through the heavy use of computers and the internet, we continue to be plagued by the problem of dirty data. Data that is error prone or inconsistent leads to bad outcomes, such as misguided decision making (e.g. inaccurate...