DELL INC. 
By - Implementing Toad Business Intelligence Suite saves university 20 hours a week on data provisioning and validation, and increases reporting productivity three fold while empowering administrators to make faster, more informed decisions
Dell Softwaretoday announced that Georgia's Kennesaw State University has successfully leveraged its Toad Business Intelligence Suite to transform HR processes and better enable university leaders to make timely, accurate decisions. As the third-largest and fastest-growing university in Georgia, Kennesaw State University needed a business intelligence solution that would make it fast and easy to compile and analyze payroll, benefits, employment, and academic information from diverse data sources to ensure accuracy and prevent financial loss. The university also needed a secure way to easily extend that information to non-technical users to facilitate correct and timely decision-making.
"We needed a single solution that made it possible for us tie together all of our various sources of data and information," said Brad Smith, Director of Payroll Services and Human Resource Information Systems. "We wanted something that was easy to administer and enabled us to deliver data and data analysis tools to users' desktops. Toad Business Intelligence Suite gave us all of that and more."
An integrated self-service BI solution, Toad Business Intelligence Suite allows users to easily access, prepare, analyze, and share data from any source, without sacrificing IT governance, and also dramatically simplifies and accelerates reporting. The suite includes Toad Intelligence Central, which allows users to combine data across multiple sources, locations and formats and then collaborate on logical data views through two desktop tools: Toad Data Point for analytic data provisioners and Toad Decision Point for business analysts.
With Toad Business Intelligence Suite implemented, Kennesaw's HR department not only saved 20 hours a week previously spent correcting manual reporting errors, it also went from being able to produce only 12 automated reports a year to developing and delivering 50 automated reports within two months.
Empowering University Leaders to Proactively Take Informed Action
In addition, because Toad Business Intelligence Suite allows technical users to make data readily accessible to non-technical line of business users, university leaders such as the provost and academic affairs officers can proactively pull reports featuring years of enrollment, tuition, attendance and expense data to further aid decision-making. This has proven particularly useful during the summer session, when it's critical for the university to proactively predict whether classes will incur cost, break even, or be profitable.
"For three years, I've manually created reports for the provost and academic affairs officers, but now I'm able to put that data into Toad Intelligence Central and give them the ability to pull reports themselves - much earlier than before," said Smith . "Toad BI Suite will enable them to be more proactive in their planning." The university also turned to Toad Business Intelligence Suite when it needed to use analytics to review salaries and employee turnover. Smith's team used Toad Business Intelligence Suite to extract data for salary surveys
