A database for producing student number targets
We have had great success implementing a data warehouse to
do this. It takes data from our student records database, manipulates it
through various business rules, and projects student populations forward 5 years
to inform the Finance Department's financial 5 year plan. The data
warehouse also calculates student load.
The Finance Department have a different data warehouse, and
we provide an electronic feed into this to provide them with number and load
data to inform the five year plan.
Our experience has been that it is possible to implement a
project like this without the use of consultants, provided that sufficient
groundwork is done when researching your product. We felt that employing
consultants would greatly increase the cost of implementation, and may also
prolong the project timescales.
In the event, we managed to instal the system, design our
model and produce our first plans from it within a 6 week
timeframe.
Hello -
At Brighton we have decided we need a new database
that we can use to do our planning for student number targets, that can use
data from our main student records system and also talk with our finance
systems to support work to model income
We're intending to commission a systems analyst to
prepare a professional specification for this work and I wondered whether
other colleagues had any experience of consultants doing this kind of work and
could make a recommendation, or indeed offer notes of caution
Many thanks
