Key Facts
Client: Large UK University
Department: Strategy and Planning
Tech Solution: Tableau
Challenges Faced:
Traditionally, universities have not established business management practices based on supporting data. To remain competitive, a paradigm shift is required, treating students as customers and making decisions based on data to attract and retain the right students.
This client faced the following key challenges:
- Lack of visibility and accessibility of data
- Poor understanding of underlying data available to team
- No advanced visualisation tool
University Business Model has Changed
Challenge
The University needed to step up and adapt their business model to the modern way of using data. They were missing a concise, robust and intuitive way of consolidating, using and presenting their data. The University had not combined data sources and had no advanced visualisation tool. Until now the planning team presented university performance and business data through a static series of PDF tables and Excel reports. As data was static and mostly offline, decision makers had little support for understanding the facts and trends and reasons behind the data and the information available to them. As a result, many opportunities had been missed.
Solution - Four Easy Steps
- Create a Centralised BI Data Store: Data Consolidation, Blending and Enhancement of key data sources focusing on the prioritised business areas
- Build Visualisations: Preparation of Management Information (MI) dashboards, visualising selected areas in an interactive and user-friendly fashion
- Predictive Analytics: Analysis of current and historical data to make predictions about the future. Depending on the nature of data and business scenarios, we utilised different statistical techniques and methods including predictive modelling, data mining and machine learning to provide management with a powerful decision support tool.
- Improve Data access, Visibility and Granularity: Create a user-friendly and intuitive BI self-service platform
Benefits - Data-based Decisions In Seconds
For this university, the major improvement is in the visibility and accessibility of data using a set of interactive dashboards and predictive models. Users are now empowered to make better decisions based on comprehensive and accurate data.
With the help of Billigence, management presentations are now visual, intuitive and fully interactive. The Board is empowered, meetings are more information focused and through Tableau Corporate Dashboards, information is grasped more quickly, put into context and the underlying reasons and supporting evidence all explained on the spot. The Planning Director, responsible for managing University rankings both in the UK and worldwide, is able to address questions on-the-fly, compare the university’s performance to other institutions and further explore many important data features to examine outliers. The audience can all assess and see the impact of strategic decisions on future evaluation in real-time.
All key business topics (League Tables, Corporate Plan, Predictive models) had been addressed with this solution. The team has now an interactive set of visualisations working on top of consolidated data store with newly defined semantic objects. This is a new way of working for managers and a game changer for the university.
Client Quote
“The intuitive predictive model projects the impact of strategic changes on the university’s performance, hiding the complexity of the calculations behind a simple user interface … You just pull a few sliders to see the immediate effect in visualisations. I really started to see our data in a new light. The new solution has opened up so many possibilities and new insights for us.
And we have only a big “thank you” to the people from Billigence for their dedication and the great work they have put into this project, which has got us to this point.”
– The University’s Director of Planning
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