University of South Dakota Turns to ASG-Safari™ for Datatel End-User Reporting
Industry: Higher Education
Location: South Dakota, USA
The University of South Dakota (USD), the state’s flagship university, is a growing, thriving university committed to excellence in education, research, and service. USD is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and has been a member of the North Central Association since 1913.
The Challenge
In February 1998, USD began using the student system portion of Datatel’s software. Like
many other universities, USD had been using UniQuery for reporting purposes, but was beginning
to investigate other end-user reporting packages for their system.
The Solution
In October 1999, the team at USD was introduced to the
ASG-Safari™ suite of Business Intelligence solutions
and began using the products. “I liked the fact that Safari included tools for end-user reporting and data
access,” said Kent Anderson, an integration specialist in the applications development group and member of
USD’s computing services department. “Our users can continue to use the third-party products they are
comfortable with.”
Kent established automated procedures throughout various departments at USD. In the Athletics department, icon-designated ASG-Safari ReportWriter™ reports were written for the users. They input their parameters for the reports and the report is output to their chosen destination. In the School of Business, ASG-Safari OpenAccess™ is used to retrieve their data and then employ other third-party tools for analysis. The department of Academic Affairs also uses OpenAccess for data access.
Measurable Results
“Using ASG-Safari OpenAccess, end-users in the offices of the School of Business, Athletics, Academic Affairs,
and Greek Life are able to get the data they need and generate their own reports without having to ask the
IT staff,” stated Kent. “It has relieved some of the pressures on our staff and allows us to focus on other
projects.”
USD now implements a complete Business Intelligence solution that provides both power-users and end-users with reporting and data access tools, maximizing the investment in their Datatel software.
