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Highlights of the Implementation of the
SCT Banner Management Information System

During the past two years, the management information system (MIS) central to students and critical decision-making at Wharton County Junior College, has been replaced with SCT Banner. Banner is a web-enabled administrative software product that uses an Oracle relational database and Oracle toolset.  Banner is a very robust system that is providing the scalability requirements of a growing college like Wharton County Junior College.

The software automates functions central to recruiting, financial aid processing, registration, submitting grades, billing, purchasing, and management of assets.    The project has established a centralized repository of information from across the college, integrated formerly separate systems and reduced data duplications.  This new enterprise-wide system has dramatically increased the availability and timeliness of service to WCJC students, faculty and staff, and has allowed the College to give even more personal and individual attention – one of the hallmarks of WCJC.

The implementation provides all members of the WCJC community the ability to access and update information any time, any place, on any web browser  – a live connection to WCJC information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – round the clock self-service.   It provides fast, easy access to management information to support decision-making.  The College is now a unified digital campus that brings significant enhancement to the services available for students.

Examples of services available through the Internet include: 

Students.  Register for classes, view grades, pay tuition/fees, view class schedules and locations, view course catalog, review an audit of their degree progress as they plan for graduation, view financial aid records including awards, view transcripts including courses transferred from other institutions, request an official transcript.

Faculty/Staff.  View budgets and expenses, track purchase orders, view payroll records. In addition, faculty can view class rosters, assign grades, obtain student records for advising, audit student progress toward degrees, and communicate with students by e-mail.

Enhance integration of student financial aid data is permitting more efficient processing.  Increased capacity for student data has greatly alleviated previous constraints on the data that can be maintained and tracked for student recruitment and institutional research.  Additional information that can be maintained in the integrated, on-line system includes meal plans, residence hall room assignments, classroom inventory, and faculty workload.

A learning environment is being created to empower the campus community to directly access information.  Enhancements will continue to be made throughout the coming year.  The implementation is providing the capabilities for consistent information to be available enterprise-wide to support decision-making and problem solving; end-users to be able to generate reports in near real time; data to be analyzed with a variety of standard desktop products or merged with word process software to produce correspondence. 

The project results in increased efficiency in a wide range of college functions.

• Timely information to the student at every step of his path through the college – from his first inquiry about admissions and programs through graduation. Information and services are now available to students 24 hours a day/7 days a week including payment on line with credit card.
• Rule based architecture where in the user defines the rules governing how information is processed.  Rules are maintained on line and can be altered when policies or regulations change.  An example of a simple business rule is the list of prerequisites and co-requisites for a course.
• Requisition-to-check “paperless” environments though the finance components of Web for Employee and Web-enabled forms.
• “Paperless” report distribution with SCT e-Print Reports which provides e-mail notification, virtual bursting, and output options such as downloading into a database or a spreadsheet.

In addition to the primary modules:  Student, Financial Aid, Finance, Human Resources/Payroll, and Workflow, the College has purchased SCT Strategic Enrollment Management Software and SCT TracDat. 

The implementation began March 2002 with the installation of the new servers and other hardware.   The original timelines for go-live were met for each module.  The first functional area to go-live was Finance September 2002.  The next area to go-live was Human Resources/Payroll January 2003, followed by Financial Aid March 2003 and Student for early fall registration in June 2003. The Texas Datamart for required state reporting was installed in August 2003.  Workflow implementation was completed in February 2004.  

Two significant upgrades that offer additional capabilities to currently installed modules were completed in the 2003-2004 academic year.  In December 2003, the Oracle database was upgraded from Oracle 8i to Oracle 9i.  In February 2004, all modules were upgraded from Banner 5.x to Banner 6.x.  

The implementation involved many members of the College community and required exceptional effort by all involved with the project.  The benefits are considerable and extend to the entire WCJC community.  

Enhancements to the system are continuing. 

• Implementation of SCT TracDat and SCT Strategic Enrollment Management software was completed in Summer 2004.

TracDat is a web-based software that automates the management of institutional planning and assessment process by providing a structured framework for continuous quality improvement.   Highlights of the software capabilities include

• The objectives at all levels of the institution from courses to institutional mission can be systematically related to each other with minimal clerical effort. 
  
  

• Department or program objectives can be related to institutional goals, school/division goals, department goals, courses level outcomes and external goals.
  
  

• A wide variety of assessment data from all institutional levels from classroom to institutional mission can be stored, related, and accessed.  
  
  

• The software facilitates completion of the feedback loop by through assessment data for program improvement.
  
  

• It provides efficient documentation of the impacts that assessment activities have on educational programs and administrative responsibilities.  
  
  

• Dynamically generated reports enables users to track and review problems and their respective solutions, relate goals and objectives to the institutional mission, and review courses by objectives and assorted data summaries. 
  
  

• Assessment data can be entered and accessed through the Internet making it available both on and off campus in electronic format.

The SCT Strategic Enrollment Management system has both longitudinal and point-in-time analysis capabilities. As the College enrollment and educational program offerings continue to increase, there is an increase in the yearly need for systematic evaluation of the current data along with trend data from the past in order to provide information needed for well-informed decisions concerning the curricula offered at the College. This software allows us to identify significant trends in enrollment and program utilization, to mode critical relationships, and to forecast program outcomes based on historical and current data.

• Installed the Texas Connection Consortiums modifications for HR/Payroll state reporting in November 2004.
   

• Payment on the web by personal check for student tuition and fees was completed in April 2005. Payment by credit card on the web has been available since June 2003.
   

• Direct deposit of payroll checks was made available to employees in September 2005.
   

• Installed the Texas Connection Consortiums modifications for reporting the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board through Banner baseline in December 2005.