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| Press Room |
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| An Easy, Seamless Integration of DATATEL with byREQUEST® Saves Calvin College $80,000 Annually! |
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The College is a very successful academic institution with a full time
in-house Information Technology department. A goal of the department’s
most recent IT project required a dramatic increase in reporting
efficiencies while reducing labor costs and consumables. The solution
needed to be fully automated, error-free, easily implemented, and
deliver substantial savings by eliminating paper, printing, and
delivery costs.
Today
that goal has been achieved. Calvin College now has a reliable,
efficient and cost effective report formatting and delivery system that
uses byREQUEST® from Hillary Software, seamlessly with the DATATEL
Colleague system. With byREQUEST® and DATATEL fully integrated, the
College is already saving more than $80,000 per year!
The Challenge
Dan
Pilarski, Systems Analyst at the College’s Information Technology
department knew the importance of automating the delivery of
departmental budget and expense reports and how it ultimately could
save the College significant time and money. The College has DATATEL’s
Colleague system in place. It was important to find electronic report
formatting and automated delivery technology that would provide
significant ROI (Return on Investment), be robust, proven, and most
importantly, well supported in an already stable, successful, DATATEL
Colleague environment.
"We had a project in which we sent
about 13,000 pages of financial reports every month to more than 450
individuals. The reports were printed on special paper and manually
collated, sorted and mailed," Pilarski said. "We knew this one
candidate would justify the cost for the system – plus we’re not
killing so many trees."
The department set a zero tolerance
for errors. "The reports had to be bursted into hundreds of sections
and delivered to the appropriate recipients. Someone getting someone
else’s report was unacceptable. They had to all be delivered to the
right person," Pilarski said.
The Solution
When
representatives of Calvin College attended a DATATEL Users Group
meeting, they weren’t even looking for tools that would improve the way
they deliver reports from DATATEL’s Colleague system, recalls Dan
Pilarski. However, after meeting a representative of Hillary Software
and learning about byREQUEST®, they thought again. The IT department
calculated the savings from this project alone would justify the
purchase of byREQUEST® and were convinced the product was sufficiently
proven to minimize any risk for them.
Today, the report
processes that have migrated to byREQUEST® are fully-automated, and
have significantly improved delivery time, efficiency and cost. The
College found even more value after the byREQUEST® product was
implemented and is planning to expand its use toward a paperless future!
byREQUEST®
is able to capture reports directly from DATATEL’s Colleague system,
enabling the IT department to redesign them in an electronic format and
automate their delivery. The more IT staff familiarized themselves with
byREQUEST®, the more functionality they uncovered. "For example, when
byREQUEST® bursts a report, it is able to merge data with an image,"
Pilarski said. "This enabled the College to automate the distribution
of other documents like telephone bills to students and present them in
a PDF format that looks like the paper bills they were accustomed to
receiving. Now Calvin College provides electronic delivery of telephone
bills for employees and students. The electronic delivery of student
tuition and miscellaneous charges statements is also fully automated."
Students
now use the Web to access archives of the electronic versions of
student statements bursted by byREQUEST®. Archives of internal
documents have been created for employees as well. And though they have
to set it up themselves through the Web, students can list as many as
five other people to receive their tuition and miscellaneous expense
statements. "So if a relative has offered to help with tuition, you can
add your relative to the e-statement subscription list," Pilarski said.
In
addition, the IT staff linked key fields to employee phone extensions
and student ID numbers so that the byREQUEST® distribution lists would
be automatically updated. If the employee associated with a phone
extension changes, or new student ID numbers are added to DATATEL’s
Colleague system, the byREQUEST® distribution list automatically
reflects the new information.
The IT department set up a
two-pass process, through which it creates ASCII flat files residing in
internal secure file servers for departments to review. Once the data
files are approved by the business departments, the full mailing is
triggered with different versions of reports bursted to budget
directors, vice presidents and provosts. The reports are sent out on a
"greenbar" background, similar to the greenbar printer paper that had
been used for the inter-college paper mailings.
The list of
reports that Calvin College has added to the system continues to grow.
In addition to internal financial reports, student tuition bills, and
telecom bills for students and employees, the system is used for
archiving 1098T tax forms for all students who have attended the
College in the past calendar year. It also distributes the General
Ledger Entry Report, which serves as an archive for all general ledger
entry information for the year.
The Bottom Line:
- Automating
delivery of 80,000 student tuition and expense statements a year, with
a conservative estimate of $1 savings per statement in postage,
printing, paper and preparation costs is saving the College $80,000 per year.
- For
the initial internal financial statements, savings of approximately 5
cents per sheet on 13,000 legal/landscape greenbar pages per month
translated into immediate $650 per month savings on printing and paper costs.
- The financial reports project also resulted in eight hours per month
in labor savings for the clerk who collated, stored and saved reports.
This does not include labor that had been involved in manually
addressing envelopes nor the savings of avoiding delivery through
inter-college mail.
- The College now electronically
delivers approximately 500 student telecom bills and statements a
month. Plus it has added the electronic delivery of 1,029 telecom bills
for employees as a new service because it now has the ability to do so.
More
is planned. The College is looking to begin automating the distribution
of academic evaluation reports, which are sent twice annually to
students’ academic advisors. "We have 4,200 students and many of them
have more than one advisor, so that could be anywhere between 4,000 and
10,000 reports," Pilarski said. There are also plans to automate
distribution of computer hardware/inventory reports.
As of this
fall 2005, the student statement process at Calvin College will be
paperless. There were several components involved in the College’s move
to a paperless student-billing environment including a custom-built
automated bill pay system. byREQUEST® plays a significant role in this
process.
"We are only beginning to tap the functionality and
usefulness of byREQUEST®. The efficiency it had brought us allows us to
meet the demands of today and ensure we are well supported for the
future, and Hillary Software has always been there when we needed them
to answer questions and provide outstanding customer support." Pilarski
concluded.
* * * * *
Hillary Software, Inc.
309 Morris Avenue, Spring Lake, New Jersey 07762 U.S.A. www.hillarysoftware.com
1-800-HILLARY 1-800-445-5279 1-732-974-8484 1-732-974-0167
Press Contact : Jenny A Swift 1-917-210-8064 swift@rivercalm.com
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