The situation. Nanyang Technological University is a research-intensive university with more than 20,000 undergraduates, 8,700 graduate students and 2,500 teaching and research staff from over forty countries, organised in four colleges, twelve schools and two autonomous institutes.
The challenge. NTU must report every year on the whole student lifecycle, from application and admission to post-graduation performance, and as a publicly funded university it reports to its Board of Trustees and the Ministry of Education on budgets, staffing and resource planning. Pulling the information together was tedious and manual, the results were late and inaccurate, and administrative staff leaned on Excel over outdated extracts. Trend analysis for decisions rarely had enough data behind it.
What NTU wanted. The CIO asked the Deputy Director for Applications, Ng Terk Meng, to find a tool that could be deployed quickly, was easy to use, gave management timely information and needed little implementation effort or training. That led to Qlik, with KMS as the implementation partner.
What was built. Qlik deployed to 100 users within four weeks on SAP, in-house applications, Oracle and Excel. The Admissions Office analyses application status, acceptance and enrolment, compares programme statistics across years and forecasts curricula and staffing. The university tracks graduates' academic progress and employment, including how long they take to find a first job and salary trends. Financial data is available to management and users in real time, with discrepancies between sources removed.
"The one thing that stands out the most about QlikView is the ease of use with which we were able to turn all this data into usable, actionable information. Time and effort spent on report generation and distribution has been significantly reduced, by as much as 50 percent." — Ng Terk Meng, Deputy Director (Applications), Nanyang Technological University
Results. Applications for 100 users in four weeks; 50 percent time saved compiling reports; faster and more accurate financial information; student information streamlined and centralised across departments; and end users running their own ad hoc queries without IT support. NTU planned to extend the same approach to student life data and to HR.
NTU tracks the student lifecycle and halves report production time