Sinclair Community College

08/15/08

Category: Government and NonprofitWINNER: Sinclair Community College

Category: Government and Nonprofit

WINNER: Sinclair Community College

Solution Sponsor: SAS Institute Inc.

Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, is a League of Innovation and Vanguard college with an enrollment of approximately 23,000 students.

Business Impact

Sinclair Community College implemented a business intelligence system to improve access to data for decision making and continuous improvement efforts. Examples include targeting outreach efforts for recruitment and for retention.

Before implementing SAS, Sinclair focused recruitment efforts on establishing relationships with high schools and middle schools and participated in outreach programs. With a new analytics-driven approach, Sinclair can identify and target prospective students who would most likely register and succeed at the school by mining 10 years’ worth of student data, including age, gender, GPA, graduation rate, field of study, and marital status.

Additionally, using SAS, Sinclair identified students who had not re-enrolled but were most likely to re-enroll if contacted. Telephone outreach to this population was rewarded with a 15 percent increase in enrollment in one semester.

Maturity

Before SAS, Sinclair’s internal research group had to rely on IT to write custom applications to extract data. The quickness by which Sinclair has been able to answer questions and the enterprise-wide use of the technology indicate a mature solution; more than 75 departments analyze data gathered by the college’s ERP system and over 100 reports are available to the hundreds of users accessing the system daily. Demand for system use continues to escalate.

Relevance

To ensure consistent data and confidence in reporting, Sinclair uses one software platform from which it does reporting, ad hoc analysis, and high-end analytics (data mining). A single SAS platform allows Sinclair to pull data from existing systems and optimally integrate individual technology components within its IT infrastructure.

Innovation

To spearhead the implementation and maximize the value of the business intelligence warehouse, Sinclair created the Research, Analytics, and Reporting Office, its version of a BI competency center, which serves as a “front door” to data needs. In addition, the office quickly became the institution’s single source of decision-support information, providing rapid response time, an assurance of appropriate data access, development of numerous just-in-time reports that met the needs of multiple users, and validation of data accuracy.

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