Tellius > Case Studies > Seneca College Improves Student Success with Faster Insights

Seneca College Improves Student Success with Faster Insights

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

Canada

Product

Tellius

Tech Stack

Augmented Analytics
In-memory Data Processing
Search-driven Analytics

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service

Applicable Industries

Education

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology is one of the largest colleges in Canada, with 10 campuses across the greater Toronto area. It serves 26,500 full-time and 70,000 part-time students. The college is committed to improving student success by leveraging data to understand the evolution of students from application to graduation and beyond. Cristian Durca, the Director of Information Solutions, manages all of Seneca’s software applications, including campus solutions, learning management systems, and internal finance and HR applications. The college aims to enhance the effectiveness of its business groups and deliver ad hoc reporting to the executive level by improving access to data and obtaining faster insights from all systems.

The Challenge

Seneca College faced significant challenges with their existing BI reporting system, which was tied to their ERP implementation. The system had canned reports that were not relevant to their business needs, making it difficult to customize content. Creating and publishing a single report to production took days, which was inefficient. Additionally, executives frequently had ad hoc requests for information that required a fast way to analyze many data elements and explore different metrics on the spot. Each department had specific requirements for performance metrics, necessitating a flexible way to visualize data. Furthermore, data was located in multiple source systems, including their ERP, learning management system, cloud, and custom applications. Without a centralized data warehouse, their next analytics system needed to connect to all their data sources.

The Solution

Seneca College chose Tellius as their analytics platform for several reasons. The platform's augmented analytics capabilities allowed Cristian’s team to automatically discover insights from data that the system was not trained on. This feature enabled business users to get answers quickly without needing assistance from IT. The Tellius architecture provided fast performance with in-memory data processing, allowing the college to connect and integrate data from multiple sources. It also offered scalability beyond their target of hundreds of gigabytes of data. The platform was user-friendly, making it easy for Cristian’s team to build presentations with data visualizations quickly and with minimal training. Executives and department heads could interact with the data and get answers to their questions independently. Automated key driver analysis was crucial in optimizing the student admission process, revealing which parts of the process were lagging and which students were most likely to enroll. The findings were confirmed by the business, marking a win for the team. As Seneca continues to bring more data from disparate sources into their analysis, augmented analytics will help them identify patterns and anomalies across the student journey, improving the student experience.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Tellius allowed Seneca College to improve the speed and efficiency of their data analysis processes, enabling faster insights and decision-making.
The augmented analytics capabilities of Tellius helped optimize the student admission process by identifying key drivers and areas for improvement.
The platform's ease of use facilitated the creation of data visualizations and presentations, enhancing the ability of executives and department heads to interact with data and make informed decisions.
The integration of data from multiple sources into a centralized system improved the college's ability to track and analyze performance metrics across departments.
The adoption of search-driven analytics contributed to building a data-driven culture at Seneca, empowering administrators and executives to quickly answer new questions independently.