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.
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.
