Angelo State University

Angelo State Automates Around and Beyond Banner with UC4

"Having all of our letters ready for us each day has enabled us to communicate more efficiently with our prospective students. We have many combinations of lettes and terms that would take an enormous amount of time to run ourselves. UC4 has saved us this time by automating our letter generation process."
Lisa Hernandez, Admissions Office Coordinator, Angelo State University

Customer Snapshot
Institution: Angelo State University
Business/Industry: Higher Education
Location: San Angelo, Texas, USA
Webpage: www.angelo.edu/

The Institution
Located in San Angelo, Texas, Angelo State University (ASU) serves 6,200 enrolled students and is part of the Texas Tech University System. SunGard Higher Education Banner was implemented in 2004 to enable ASU to offer past, present and future students an enhanced university experience.

The Challenge
ASU Admissions needed help if they were going to get the 88 different letter types and 3,000 actual documents produced by student letter generation out each night. Reducing manual forms input, interface management and report checking would reduce errors and free-up staff for more productive tasks. It did not take Angelo State University long to realize how much they could benefit if they were able to accelerate completion of Banner student processing from admission through matriculation.

"You need a scheduler because Banner is not automated", said Jeff Riels, Oracle DBA, Angelo State University. "Initially we had users checking each report and submitting jobs manually. They were spending their day running jobs and not getting on with their work."

Student Letter Generation
Aware that other schools had faced similar issues, ASU deployed UC4 to complement Banner letter generation, financial aid disbursement and other university processing. Taking advantage of pre-built templates, ASU functional users sat down with technical support to determine job flows and to build initial schedules to automate student letter generation.
"Having all of our letters ready for us each day has enabled us to communicate more efficiently with our prospective students. We have many combinations of letters and terms that would take an enormous amount of time to run ourselves.  UC4 has saved us this time by automating our letter generation process", said Lisa Hernandez, Admissions Office Coordinator at ASU.

The Solution
Automating job submissions, eliminating typing errors, controlling dependencies and better error handling has released at least one FTE staff from letter generation responsibilities.
 
"Without automated letter generation we would have someone full time dedicated to getting student letters out each night", said Riels. "When you see the number of steps and dependency checks for this and other job flows, you also see the potential for mistakes and sequencing delays. Removing the need for our users to manually submit requests and check reports has allowed us to eliminate typing errors, save time and be more responsive to their needs."

Word got out on the impact of automating student letter generation. At ASU, Financial Aid Disbursement was a heavily manual driven process consisting of 50 individual steps that needs to be run all year. Staff was spending half a day setting up each Financial Aid job. 50 steps became 6 with Banner Enterprise Job Scheduler by UC4 and run times were reduced from 3 hours to 30 minutes.

Financial Aid Disbursement
"Processing a data load manually in Banner was time consuming, not to mention the possibility of being interrupted and that slim chance of data entry error.  Since we have implemented Banner Enterprise Job Scheduler by UC4 the data load process is a breeze. When we were manually processing data loads we were only able to do data loads 3 times a week, now that we have Banner Enterprise Job Scheduler by UC4 we are able to run data loads daily", said Michelle Bennett, Student Finance Administrator, ASU.

ASU has automated various tasks with Banner Enterprise Job Scheduler by UC4 including daily monitoring for approval transfers to general ledger and end-of-day reconciliation processing. System administration jobs such as audit table and log file cleanups have also been automated.

"At Angelo State, we have automated the automation process. We have created our own utility that dynamically builds the job streams for letter generation. This means we don't run jobs needlessly and, having organized standards for job names, we can track and control our batch processing", said Riels.

"Smart schools don't have lots of their people manually running Banner jobs. A couple of our functional users manage all the workload we run at Angelo State", said Riels. "We work in an industry that is susceptible to change – changes in federal funding rules, changes in state funding rules. With Banner Enterprise Job Scheduler by UC4 we don't have to reinvent the wheel on the whole process each time one of these changes comes along. We can just update our existing processing chains and move on."

At A Glance

Business Challenge

• Produce 3000 student letters daily on 88 document types
• Minimize manual interactions with Banner
• Compress batch workload into overnight window

UC4 Solution

• Automatic error checks and notifications
• Out-of-the-box Banner integration templates
• Output file scanning
• Complex dependencies

UC4 Benefits

• Increased staff productivity
• Results get to ASU students get sooner
• Financial Aid run time slashed from 3 hours to 30 minutes
• ASU is more agile in response to industry changes