UTM is the largest engineering-based university in Malaysia, located at the southern fringe of peninsular Malaysia. The university has received accolades for being the pioneer of engineering and technological knowledge and expertise. UTM is one of the many facets of national aspirations to become a fully developed and knowledge-rich country by the year 2020.

The university has two campuses located Johor and Kuala Lumpur respectively. The institution of higher learning also offers long-distance learning courses for part-time students. With more than 200,000 technical graduates and qualified professionals produced by the university, it has rightfully received the honorary designation as Malaysia’s Premier University in the field of Engineering and Technology.

UTM conducted operations based on multiple systems with different data sources such as Oracle and MS SQL Server. Previously reports were manually stored and produced in either MS Excel or MS Access format. This was a highly taxing mode of operations for the human resources of the university. Such a practice for producing reports was also highly prone to errors and without the presence of transactional or historical data in the system, comparative analysis was not possible.

Specifically, to avoid data redundancy and needless repetitive manual insertion of data into different systems, UTM sought to consolidate data and create an integrated workflow between their systems which included AIMS, HR which contained staff information, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), E-LEARNING, SPACE which contained information for part-time students, KLINIK, GSMS for post-graduate student information, PSZ and LMS (Library Management System).

All this inefficiency was exemplified by the lack of timely access to information, lack of data consistency between data sources as well as obstacles in considering data as valuable strategic resources.

The Speedminer Data Warehouse and Business Performance Management system was implemented in 2008. The result was consolidation of data from different sources into one common platform. Access to information was greatly simplified, with information being delivered to users, regardless of the data source. As a result, users spent less time manually looking for the right data and instead, made productive use of their time for informed decision-making as well as collaboration based on shared information.

Data connectivity and synchronizarion between the different systems was finally achieved when for instance, information from SPACE, AIMS and HR would be transferred to PSZ for library registration process in the Library Management System (LMS) so as to allow students access to the library privileges, services and collections.

Focus:

• Successful integration with the Ensemble platform.
• Data connectivity and synchronization between different departments.
• Automated report generation.

Moreover, to make data truly accessible by all authorized individuals, users are not expected to have any formal programming skills, with such user-friendliness extending to the functions of analysis and reporting, the ad hoc analysis tool.

Reports being produced in a manual fashion represent a thing of the past, as with Speedminer, report generation can be completed with simple drag-and-drop functions. Informative dashboards were also implemented to provide users with insight at a quick glance.

Based on the principles of intuitiveness and cost-effectiveness, Speedminer empowers users to be able to access and analyze information based on familiar tools such as Web browsers. Data has been given new meaning through the integrated data warehouse. Now, in-depth analysis, accurate long-term strategic planning and collaboration in terms of operational functions and disciplines have become a tangible reality, by virtue of the Speedminer system.

Examples of reports produced include Student Completion Rate Statistics, Student Enrolment Statistics, Graduates On Time based on Session and Course, CGA and CPA Analysis, and also Correlation for MUET with CPA.