First Full Web-Based Self-Service Reporting "A Cut Above the Rest"

The Universities Admissions Centre (UAC) operates as a central point to receive and process applications for admission to the majority of undergraduate degree, diploma and advanced diploma courses at fifteen New South Wales tertiary education institutions. While it is the participating institutions that decide on those students who will receive offers to courses, it is the UAC's responsibility to coordinate the processes.

Every year, tens of thousands of applications are received by the UAC via the web, telephone and mail. The data contained in each of those applications, once captured and stored in an Ingres database, needs then to be made available to institutions and their faculties over the Internet and in a format that will enable them to select the most suitable course candidates.

In order to provide that facility and ensure it can be achieved with high levels of data security, extraction, manageability and accuracy, UAC's Information Technology Manager, Andrew Harrop, opted for an upgrade to SAS®9.

Support requirements halved
One of the basic requirements of the UAC's reporting solution is web enablement – providing full functionality and feature sets over the Internet to users, without the need for internally developed HTML scripts and pages.

"For us, it means we don't need to touch the client machines because it's essentially a zero-footprint interface; and the SAS®9 web front-end is so intuitive that most users can start using the system with barely any training."

According to Harrop, the newly designed web front-end is now so easy to use that his internal SAS®9 team has seen support requirements nearly halved since the upgrade. "Our users have found that they're able to create queries and reports more quickly and easily than with the earlier version of SAS," he says. "So much so, in fact, that demand for support is only 40 to 50 per cent of what it was previously.

"Essentially, SAS gives us the ability to provide a total reporting solution to our users without the need to allocate internal IT department resources devoted to the task of writing bespoke reports."

The security factor
Data security is one of the key issues about which Harrop and his team are constantly concerned. With applicants providing a large amount of personal information, UAC is ultimately responsible to ensure only authorised people have access to the information that is relevant to their reporting requirements.

"Security is of paramount importance and it's an area in which SAS has given us precisely what we need," Harrop states. "Aside from using SAS' own log-in and password authentication features, our users in the institutions are unable to view information that we determine is inappropriate."

Enormous flexibility
"SAS gives us an enormous amount of reporting flexibility, which is extremely important given the diversity of requirements each institution and their individual faculties have in the candidate selection process," Harrop says. "The number of variables that can be applied to each report, along with their various weightings really called for a reporting solution that's a cut above the rest."

Representing a major part of the solution being "a cut above the rest" and contributing to a further reduction in user support is SAS®9's customisation flexibility. "The ability to customise a BI solution is essential," Harrop states. "While the users are now able to create fairly complex reports themselves without much support, we're still called on to help with sophisticated, advanced queries or creating reports that export data to unique file formats.

"With SAS®9, what used to take us days or even sometimes weeks of customisation efforts, now takes only a couple of hours. As a result, we have reduced our support overheads even further and our users are getting results much faster than ever before."

Another advantage UAC's SAS®9 solution has delivered is the ability to import the information generated by SAS directly into either an Excel spreadsheet or an institution's own student administration system. "So while the reporting aspect is fundamental to the solution's success," Harrop says, "it actually provides the means by which we're able to support the institutions in drastically reducing the amount of time it takes for data entry with their own systems.

"The SAS®9 solution really comes down to providing the best possible reporting facilities to our users. It's just that simple!"

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