Lakeland College improved their student and staff experience with the rollout of fluid features and built a suite of powerful Kibana dashboards

Starting in 2021, Lakeland College has partnered with NTT DATA to initiate and complete multiple PeopleSoft optimization projects that leveraged value from PeopleSoft and improved how students, employees and departmental staff interact and work within the system. These initiatives have been across FSCM, Campus Solutions, and HCM.

Analytics

NTT DATA implemented Kibana dashboards across Campus Solutions, FSCM, and HCM in three separate deployments in 2022.

For Campus Solutions, the Admission Statistics report was previously created manually by Lakeland College with data represented in charts presented to the company executive using Microsoft Excel. For Campus Solutions, Lakeland College used the Oracle-delivered framework to create Kibana dashboards for admissions application information. Seven visualizations were created as part of the admissions statistics dashboard:

• Five tag cloud visualizations: Application admit terms, Campus, Year of study, Program level ownership, Citizenship status of DOM (domestic) or INT (international).
• One stacked bar chart for Application unique count by program and program action.
• One bar chart for Application unique count by program.

Creating Kibana dashboards with visualizations greatly reduced the manual effort required to query the data, extract into Excel, and the build charts. The dashboard allows management to monitor the data more frequently, rather than being dependent on a manual report production.

In FSCM, the My Budget, Financial Position Trend, and Financial Performance Analysis Kibana dashboards delivered GL were implemented as an aid for departmental end users. Users can filter data using a department tree designed for use with the dashboards. This enables departmental users to track spending and budget trends over time for key departments.

For HCM, the delivered Health and Safety Kibana dashboard was implemented.

User Experience

Fluid Expense, My Wallet and PO Requisition Approval were implemented in the fall 2022.

Lakeland College implemented the fluid My Wallet Expense process with integration to daily credit card transaction file uploads. Faster access to the credit card transactions along with the fluid approval and data entry pages helped to reduce the amount of manual data entry and improved data accuracy and user experience.

The fluid Requisition Approval pages were implemented replacing an older requisition approval process with the more robust Approval Framework technology. The new process requires all requisitions be approved by a predefined hierarchy of managers and depends on the dollar amount of the requisition and the position of the requestor in the approval hierarchy. The new process improved requisition oversight and enhanced audit capabilities and user experience.

In addition, several new features and capabilities were rolled out including combination editing, Kibana dashboards, custom multiple query tool, customer statements, billing invoice email process, WorkCenters, expense my wallet, fluid purchase order requisition approval and new reports.

For Campus Solutions, Lakeland College expanded their use of Campus Solutions by implementing new capabilities such as WorkCenters, custom Kibana dashboards for admissions and enrollment statistics, batch refund process, new file-based extract Application Engine processes for library and ID card systems, and external gateway integration with Moneris Checkout. Lakeland College plans to further improve the user experience by implementing fluid self-service in Campus Solutions for students and applicants. The implementation of student and applicant fluid self-service is in progress and scheduled to be in production by July 2023.

WorkCenters included all important transactions and reports that each department group ran on a daily basis. This reduced the time taken for them to navigate through several pages, or to organize their long list of favorites. WorkCenters provided them with a central place to complete their work and daily activities.

For HCM, several opportunities to extend functionality were identified such as the implementations of health and safety and HCM Kibana dashboards. HCM initiatives continue into 2023 with offboarding activity guides and the implementation of profile management including the creation of new indexes for bolt on components.