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Community College of Rhode Island
Three years in the making
Banner phase-in a success
Attention CCRI Students, Faculty and Staff: Banner is making your life better.
For the past three years, the college has been phasing in a new information system called Banner, which has helped CCRI staff behind the scenes improve efficiency in the areas of finance, student services functions and, most recently, human resources. Although students may not be aware of these changes in information processing, they certainly have felt its positive effects in the areas of financial aid and advising.
Mark Vigorito, project leader for Banner’s financial aid module, says that the new system has drastically reduced turn-around times for processing state grants. Before Banner’s implementation, CCRI staff would have to calculate student’s eligibility and update student’s computerized information by hand—a process that in the past could take weeks to complete, he says. Now, many of these functions are automated. “In Banner,” Vigorito raves, “the process takes a few hours to complete.” Bursar Dennis Grassini agrees that Banner has streamlined the processing of student loans, describing the pre-Banner process as “very tedious, with a lot of manual work.”
Banner now provides a direct feed between the financial aid data and the college bookstore, says IT Director of Management Information Systems Alice Aguiar, project manager for Banner implementation. “Before Banner, financial aid and book loan students would go to the bookstore and have to stand in a separate line, where all the processing was done manually, because financial aid information was not in the bookstore’s system,” she says. Now, those same students can stand in line and be processed quickly through the bookstore computer, just like everyone else.
Advising and counseling staff have also seen a positive impact from Banner. For example, the new system allows students not only to register online, but to adjust their own schedules on the Web, a function formerly reserved for advising and counseling staff. Advising and Counseling Coordinator Lisa Mallozzi explains, “No longer do students need to wait in line to see an advisor when trying to register for a class that had previously closed during their initial registration session. By learning the online registration process, they are able to log on at any time to check for openings in specific classes which may have occurred due to other students’ dropping.” This not only eases the process for students, it also frees up staff to deal with more complex advising issues.
Another important planning and assessment tool for students—a degree audit—has been enhanced through Banner, Aguiar says. “In the old system, students could see their audit on the computer, but could not do ‘what if’ scenarios,” she explains. Now, students can get important feedback to questions such as “What if I change my major?” by querying through Pipeline.
Banner benefits faculty
One of the many perks of Banner is that it creates a single, unified database platform for information. This single database houses student transcript and billing, enrollment, college finance and human resources information—a veritable treasure trove of information to someone who understands how to access it. Oracle Discoverer, an ad hoc reporting tool that works with Banner, makes accessing and understanding this information much easier for a variety of end-users, including administrators and department chairs.
Early on in the Banner implementation process, “IT met with department chairs, and asked, ‘What are your reporting needs?’” Aguiar says. “One response indicated a need to better track course enrollments.” With that in mind, Aguiar’s team created a report, available through Discoverer, which shows closed courses, open courses, and courses with low enrollments. These reports are critical for planning cancellations as well as for opening new sections of closed courses that students need.
In addition, department chairs themselves can now run a missing grade report that is individualized to their department. Aguiar recalls, “Before, chairs would have to make a request of Enrollment Services, who would have to put in a request for IT, who would have to shut down outside access to the computer system in order to run a report overnight.” Banner, then, eliminates the need for a middleman. It also reduces turn-around time and keeps access to the database open nearly around the clock.
The system is open seven days a week, 23 1/2 hours each day—a big improvement from the old days, when the system had to go offline for several hours each night in order to perform back-up and processing functions.
Because Discoverer can create customized reports, faculty who work with students in such groups as Phi Theta Kappa and Honors Program can generate key contact information for themselves—such as mailing addresses or emails. Prior to Banner, communications with such student groups were often limited to “speedy seals,” pressure-treated standardized letters that were very limited in terms of design or individualization. Now, any data gathered from a Discoverer report can also be imported to Microsoft Word or Excel software, so that mailings have the potential to be both personalized and professional.
Human Resources looks to the future
In January, the Human Resources module of Banner was officially launched, making it the third and final module to go live in the information system’s three-year-long implementation process. At this writing, the Payroll Department has successfully run two payrolls from the new system.
Prior to Banner, Personnel had to pull employee information from two separate databases—one for in-house employees and one for state employees. This not only complicated the payroll process, it severely impeded the department’s ability to conduct employee research and produce reports. “Banner will give us the potential to have all of our data under one roof,” explains Sheri Norton, director of human resources. “The relational database aspects of Banner should allow us to produce some great management reports.”
Norton and her team have participated in an intensive, year-long Banner education program in which they helped personalize the system to CCRI’s unique needs. “We have built a foundation for the future of human resources at the college,” she says. Norton foresees offering Banner’s employee self-service functions one day—services that could allow employees to check their benefits and fill out their time cards on line.
Norton’s look toward the future underscores an important point about the whole Banner system: it will change and grow as CCRI changes and grow. “Based on our original project plan, and based on our goals, we are on time and on budget,” says Aguiar. “But, the work isn’t over.”
Implementation teams continue to meet to discuss and work on system issues as they arise. The teams are also in the early planning stages of their efforts to migrate from Banner 6 to Banner 7. In order to stay current with changes to the system necessitated by Federal Financial Aid regulations CCRI must be up and running with Banner 7 by January 2007. These hard-working groups at CCRI continue to make things better with Banner.
