Success Stories

THE CHALLENGE

A Philadelphia university in chose IBM Cognos to replace their legacy reporting tools across several divisions. These tools were used by institutional advancement, finance, HR, and student records. They faced a deadline to decommission the older tools that would provide significant cost savings on licensing, maintenance, and support. The university wanted to schedule reports after their nightly database refresh. Previously, the university had no way to join these reports together–or to anticipate and predict their reporting needs.

THE SOLUTION

TechD analyzed the university’s process, finding redundant reports run at inappropriate times. They implemented Cognos reporting and dashboards–allowing IT personnel to streamline their reporting processes. TechD then joined these processes to a unified enterprise scheduler to kick-off reporting after nightly refresh. In addition, TechD analyzed the university’s license and usage models–as well as the performance of the Cognos environment. In the process, they were able to identify a number of uneeded users–as well as non-users of licenses.

THE BENEFITS

Thanks to TechD and Cognos, the university can now better utilize its computing cycles. Licenses and usage models have also been improved, due to a common platform for all reporting and the importation of legacy data. The improvement is substantial. An audit that took place over six months has allowed TechD to optimize the university’s system usage, show appropriate license usage, and eliminate redundant reports. In addition, customized training for over 100 team members has reduced the university’s long-term training costs.