Business Challenges

• System Scalability to Accommodate Massive Growth – Unlocking the online market, the university saw student enrollment growth of 433% over a 5-year period and as a result experienced challenges with outdated systems and processes.
• Lack of Data Transparency and Collaboration – Disparate systems and data sets created a silo-ed structure in which collaboration to support decision making was difficult because stakeholders did not have confidence in what was the “true” data.
• Versioning– Unable to develop an Operational and Financial plan within the same platform with shared drivers and underlying logic to manage the front and back office operations of the university in unison.
• Inflexible Legacy Processes “Black Box” – required heavy manual intervention and lengthy cycle times when business or logic changes were needed.

Solution

• Anaplan Student Enrollment Forecasting Engine – Enables the projection of expected student enrollments for future academic terms.  Historical enrollments of homogenous student cohorts are used to predict future enrollments and aggregate to provide a full university student profile across colleges, programs, and delivery methods.
• Anaplan Revenue Planning Model– Calculates a revenue forecast based off of the Anaplan enrollment forecasting engine which allows stakeholders to view projected revenue by academic term or on a fiscal calendar basis.
• Anaplan Expense Planning Model – Calculated off of projected student enrollments and fixed expenses at a cost center level.  The high-level visibility of a university-wide expense profile, coupled with revenue projections, allows the university to make strategic investment decisions.
• Anaplan Workforce Planning Model – Position planning enables a “bottoms-up” view into expenses related to employee costs per cost center.  The connected nature of Anaplan allows for the sensitive position data to be secured within the model, while providing visibility of cost center impacts and key employee metrics.
• Anaplan Project Planning and Forecasting Model – Allows for all necessary stakeholders to plan for and have visibility into all approved and planned projects.  The expenses expected from those projects are integrated into the overall university expense profile and provide the ability to connect project decisions with their university expense impact.
• Interconnected Operational and Financial Planning Processes – Anaplan allows up to 150+ financial and operational managers across the university to view and leverage the same enrollment projections, revenue forecast, and planned expenses to make valuable business decisions on both the day-to-day operational level and also on long-term strategic initiatives.

Impact

• Decreased Forecast Processing Time by 75% – Reduced student enrollment forecast processing time from 4 hours to less than 1 hour. Ability to run what-if analysis near real time where previously could take hours to days.
• Real Time Connectivity of Processes – The student enrollment forecast feeds 6 separate downstream models enabling revenue projections, staffing capacity and demand needs, and expense planning across multiple teams and functions.
• Real Time What-if Analysis – Scenario planning capabilities allows for real-time updates to the forecast providing the visibility to make operational and financing decisions.
• Faster Budget and Forecast Cycles – Less effort spent on data management and exception logic makes more time for value-added analysis