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Integrated Business Intelligence Solution

Business Situation

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC) wanted a central repository of data and analysis tools that help them determine which factors in the lives of their students lead to their success. They planned to use this data to design and launch initiatives that help improve the success of their students.

The challenge was that this data comes in various forms and lives in several different source systems, including:

  • Peoplesoft – student demographic data, class and program enrollments and grade information
  • Blackboard – course-work for classes and student's usage activity within the application
  • Starfish – faculty-to-student communications
  • Salesforce – student event attendance and student interactions

“The Core team was able to make the vision we had for our new data warehouse a reality. Our Institutional Research team is now able to spend their time building reporting solutions in Power BI, where in the past they first needed to spend hours and hours pulling datasets out of our systems.”

John Kopp | Director of Enterprise Applications | NWTC

Our Solution

Our solution included the ETL processing to load and conform the data into a Kimball style data warehouse. This data warehouse provides report authors and data analysts the ability to view, analyze and report on data for individual students and at an aggregate level across the different source systems.

By leveraging Bion, we could quickly build and refactor the data warehouse and ETL processes as the project progressed and requirements were determined and clarified. This solution also provides the baseline for inclusion of future additional source system data.

The Results

  • Consolidated Enterprise Data Warehouse with data from multiple data sources.
  • ETL processing to transform the raw source data into the Kimball dimensional model.
  • Tabular model on top of Data Warehouse supporting aggregate level analysis and reporting in Power BI and Excel.

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College is a nationally-ranked, 2-year public college where students prepare for high-tech careers and begin bachelor’s degrees.

Technologies Used

Azure Hosting

Bion

Microsoft Power BI

SQL Server