True Decision Support with Argos

The Challenge

Hilbert College (Hilbert) had a major need for pursuing an easy-to-use decision support system. Data driven decision-making is very important to Hilbert and the administrative council recognized the need for better access to real-time information. The first step was to get reliable source information. This led to the choice of PowerCampus by Ellucian for their student system, Raiser’s Edge for Advancement, PowerFAIDS for financial aid and Great Plains for finance.

Hilbert has 15+ years of development experience with Microsoft Access as a front-end to applications, and continued its use after implementing the new administrative software solutions. Knowing well the limitations of Access as a reporting tool, the Hilbert development team investigated Microsoft Reporting Services. It found this tool did not have the flexibility and rapid development capability that Hilbert desired. Hilbert required a reporting solution that would give every campus department access to real-time data and could easily connect to all of their systems, making true decision support a reality.

The Solution

Hilbert was introduced to Evisions at a user conference in 2010. The Hilbert attendees were immediately impressed with the power and flexibility of Argos, the Enterprise Reporting Solution from Evisions. Based on Argos’ ease of use, its rich feature set, and the willingness of Evisions to partner with Hilbert on ensuring Argos and PowerCampus compatibility, Hilbert selected Argos as their choice. Within a few months, Hilbert was able to create over 30 working reports and several dashboards. Through Argos, nearly every department has access to information they need.

Here are a few examples of how Hilbert uses Argos for decision support:

• A real-time dashboard that monitors new and returning students supporting both Admissions and Student Records. The status dashboard shows overall registration by degree and major, while drill-down capability allows the user to view information on actual students enrolled for detailed analysis or communication. The VP for Enrollment Management has access to this dashboard, which does an automatic refresh every 10 minutes – especially useful during peak registration periods.
• An advisement view to track the student body, including at-risk students, with a variety of selection possibilities including term, curriculum, student type and year level.
• Secure access to their budgets allows Hilbert budget managers to view summary activity and to drill down to transaction detail by account. Managers can search and view current or historical vendor related activity, with trending options.
• Enrollment monitoring and trends by department and major, while providing dashboards for monitoring by age, ethnicity, Financial Aid, academic performance, and more.
• Analysis of registration dates and impact on academic outcomes.
• An immunizations report necessary for state compliance, showing which students still need certain shots to remain in school as well as the dorm students that require additional immunizations.
• A report on student athletes necessary for NCAA compliance showing the GPA and full-time status of all athletes as well as providing an analysis by sport.
• A report on students living on campus in dorms and apartments providing student performance for a particular location which can also be used for the pairing of roommates.

And the list goes on and on…

Going forward, Hilbert is exploring the use of Argos by students so they have improved information access with a secure web portal where their accounts, grades, financial aid information and holds can be viewed. This will save Hilbert time and money that would have been spent on printing and mailing.

Argos has made a huge positive impact on data-driven decision making at Hilbert. School officials can now easily view reports from all their various software solutions and, with this easy access to their data, achieve greater success.