Jefferson College is a community college in Jefferson County, Missouri, serving around 3,700 full-time and part-time students. The College’s mission is to serve the community by delivering quality learning opportunities that empower individuals to achieve their goals. Dedicated faculty and staff are committed to delivering the highest standards of education and comprehensive student support to help students achieve their educational and career aspirations.
The College offers five associate degrees and multiple certificate options. Some of the well-known programs include general studies, education, business, veterinary technology, nursing, and law enforcement. Jefferson offers numerous opportunities for growth outside the classroom, from athletics events and student organizations to performing arts and cultural enrichment.
The faculty and staff at Jefferson College had ongoing reporting requirements that placed a heavy burden on IT and support staff. This often took time, and there were often delays where data would take a few weeks to gather. By that time, the data was either outdated or no longer relevant. These delays were mainly caused by the college’s use of Banner software for their student information system, and Cognos and ODS (Operational Data Store) for reporting. These were both sophisticated tools that were not used outside of the IT and Institutional Research departments.
According to Dr. Kim Harvey-Manus, VP of Student Services, “this created a bottleneck making the end users dependent on IT for getting access to data they needed.”
Kim’s responsibility spans across several initiatives at Jefferson where she also oversees strategic enrollment management and institutional accreditation.
The IT team was tasked with finding an enterprise-wide solution that provided a centralized reporting system that would be easy to use for staff across the college. They shortlisted several potential options, including Millennium’s FAST solution, which they discovered through a marketing campaign.
Millennium FAST was the clear frontrunner through the selection process, offering a self-service system that would work for anyone who needed it across the College. The fact that the platform was fully customizable, intuitive, and easy to operate made switching to Millennium FAST evident.
The Jefferson College faculty and staff began to realize that they no longer needed the IT team to run reports. This meant timely information could get in their hands faster, and they could make decisions in real-time. The IT department also saw the benefit of not having to manually go into the database to pull data and compile reports. It allowed them to be more efficient and focus on supporting other areas of the college operations.
Once Millennium FAST was implemented, Jefferson College started to see results in efficiency and a reduction in manual processes. Not having to reach out to IT for reporting needs also meant a reduction in the total cost of supporting all the interconnected systems. In addition, the software was easy to implement and very user-friendly. The average implementation time for Millennium FAST can be taken on in less than a day.
The FAST implementation had an immediate impact campus-wide. Faculty and staff across the college now have access to data on demand. If a department needed key information, such as applicants with missing admission requirements or students who have not yet enrolled, staff can easily retrieve this information and proactively reach out to these students. It enables users of the software to get ahead of important strategic decisions because the information is at their fingertips. Under the old system, a two week-old report caused them to react instead of proactively make decisions and take action.
According to Dr. Harvey-Manus, “With FAST, our end users are able to access their data with minimal IT assistance. FAST reporting is a tool that truly became a game changer for our end users and a tool that is utilized campus-wide.”
Overall, Millennium FAST has helped Jefferson College save weeks of time, while providing an environment where faculty and staff can make timely key decisions to ensure their students’ success.
“Jefferson College’s experience with Millennium has been outstanding! The higher education background and understanding of the data challenges we are facing have been instrumental in developing our dashboards and reports. From listening to our needs to walking through our processes to building our dashboards, staff have been receptive and responsive each step of the way. Staff are very collaborative, and they are open to trying anything. No idea or suggestion is too big or too small! Thank you, Peter, Anna, and Erika!” - Kim Harvey-Manus, Ph.D., Vice President of Student Services
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