ASG-Safari™ Enhances Reporting Capabilities for Lebanon Valley College
Industry: Higher Education
Location: Pennsylvania, USA
Founded in 1866, Lebanon Valley College (LVC) is a private, coeducational institution on the site of the Annville Academy in Annville, PA. It promotes a four-year program of study in the liberal arts with approximately 1,500 full-time students. US News & World Report noted LVC as one of the top ten liberal arts schools in the Northeast.
The Challenge
LVC began using Datatel’s software products in 1990 and produced a multitude of character-based reports
using UniQuery. When Datatel partnered with ASG and introduced the ASG-Safari suite of Business Intelligence
solutions, LVC became very interested. At that time, the IT department at LVC received numerous requests for
reports with more visual impact and advanced graphics capabilities.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for improved reporting solutions, LVC decided to beta test
ASG-Safari™ with Datatel software.
After utilizing the power of ASG-Safari to access his data, Bob Dillane, Director of Information Management Services
r LVC, created a number of reports. “I found the ASG-Safari tools to be more sophisticated than UniQuery,” said Dillane.
“Now, I get a lot of requests from various departments to create reports that require more formatting than UniQuery
ever allowed. With ASG-Safari, I create visually impressive reports, or use ASG-Safari OpenAccess” to export my data
to Microsoft® Excel, or any other desktop package that manipulates data.”
Measurable Results
ASG-Safari OpenAccess has proved to be extremely useful in the Student Services department.
The department supervisor analyzes student data in many different combinations and sequences.
Instead of creating a large number of reports on a daily basis, a view was set up in ASG-Safari
to include 40 different fields of data pertaining to each student. Excel then accesses that view
using OpenAccess. Student Services uses Excel to manipulate the data and create spreadsheets with
the information they choose to see for that day.
“The ASG-Safari products have helped this department tremendously,” said Dillane. “We housed all the data on each student in our database, but didn’t have an easy way to get the data out. ASG-Safari extracts the data to the desktop so we can identify trends and measure performance of the student body.”
ASG-Safari has provided LVC with a way to access, analyze, and distribute their data to decision makers throughout the college, optimizing their Datatel software and ensuring the most efficient return on their technology investment.
