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Sisense > Case Studies > Automating BI and ETL for Enhanced Enrollment: A MindMax Case Study

Automating BI and ETL for Enhanced Enrollment: A MindMax Case Study

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Education
Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Leasing Finance Automation
Material Handling Automation

The Challenge

MindMax, a company that partners with universities to increase enrollment, particularly among continuing education and adult learners, faced a significant challenge in scaling its customer base. The company's legacy analytics and BI solution required manual extraction of data from disparate sources, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, and Marketing Automation systems. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, making it difficult to create meaningful reports and dashboards that incorporated data from all these different sources. The company's VP of Technology, Brian DiScipio, and Senior Business Analyst, Kiersten Warendorf, recognized the need for a cleaner, faster way to empower their customers with data-driven insights. They knew that the full automation of BI and ETL through the creation of a modern data pipeline and stack was crucial for the company's growth.

The Customer

MindMax

About The Customer

MindMax is a company that partners with universities to increase enrollment, particularly among continuing education and adult learners. The company provides its partner universities with data-driven insights that inform optimization of traffic and lead generation, empower administrators to maximize and manage enrollment, and guide potential students through the application and registration process. MindMax's customer base is primarily made up of universities and colleges that use varying software systems and technologies. The company's goal is to empower these institutions with actionable, data-driven insights at every step of the enrollment funnel.

The Solution

MindMax decided to implement the Sisense Data and Analytics Platform, which allowed them to pull in data from different sources, manipulate all of that data in one place, and present it simply in one chart or graph. However, to completely automate the ETL process, MindMax needed a wider variety of data connectors. They found the solution in Fivetran, a preferred Sisense platform partner known for simplifying data connectivity to high-performance data warehouses. Setting up Fivetran and Google BigQuery was quick and easy, and it instantly freed up a significant amount of Warendorf’s time, which she could dedicate to conducting analyses and generating insights. Fivetran brought all of MindMax’s data into one location, Google BigQuery, and the MindMax team used Sisense to create dashboards and analytics using this data.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Sisense and Fivetran has had a transformative impact on MindMax's operations. The company and its customers are now empowered by insights gleaned from clean, consistent data across the data pipeline. The ability to ingest student information as part of the data set provides a huge advantage, as colleges and universities use varying software systems and technologies. Internally, the use of Sisense has spread across multiple departments, including marketing and project managers. Externally, MindMax can now easily pull data for each customer, display actionable insights in a meaningful way, and keep data private across customer accounts. Some customers even have access to their own customized dashboards powered by real-time analysis. This has nurtured a more data-driven culture both within MindMax and among its customers.

Quantitative Benefit

Freed up 50% of DiScipio and Warendorf’s time
Half of MindMax employees are actively using Sisense across multiple departments
Adding social platforms and student information systems as data sources