Birmingham City University Conquers HESES Regulatory Deadlines with Alteryx

• Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service

• Education

• Business Operation

• Predictive Quality Analytics
• Predictive Replenishment

• Data Science Services

Birmingham City University is required to make mandatory annual returns to the OfS (Office for Students, previously HEFCE) to verify its government funding allocation. The Planning and Performance Department must pull together information from several internal systems and external sources to complete the aggregated funding return of student activity. Amassing and preparing the data from multiple sources is a significant, sizeable and complex challenge; with regulatory timeframes for the HESES return generally imposing a 7 working day turnaround from the census point of 1 December. Improving automation and underpinning processes became increasingly important both for securing efficiencies and for maintaining high levels of data integrity. It is essential that legitimate changes compared to prior years are clearly and accurately demonstrated, as this has the potential to affect the university’s core funding grant.

The first Birmingham School of Design was opened in 1843 by The Birmingham Society for Artists, and gained university status in 1992. Since then, it has evolved into a thriving institution with 24,000 students from around the world and has been recognised as a world-leader for its research across various disciplines. Today, the university produces some of the UK’s most employable graduates from its state-of-the-art facilities in Birmingham, England. Delivering these services are four faculties, which cover a broad range of subjects and specialisms.

In response to the increasingly data-driven requirements of the sector, the university was investigating Tableau to improve its business intelligence (BI) analysis generally, when it discovered Alteryx. The team extract student enrolment data for the current reporting year from SITS – the university’s student record management database – and inject it into Alteryx. They then use Alteryx to blend it with other key reference data, including ‘static’ data relating to courses, modules, funding and fees categories. This allows them to process Undergraduate separately from Postgraduate to reflect the different HESES funding calculations and reporting requirements. These categories include UK or EU fundable students, overseas non-fundable students, level of study such as undergraduate or postgraduate, whether the students are new entrants or continuing, funding group splits, and more. This process creates the current “census population” dataset to which is added a prediction around “late enrolments” such as starts after the December census date, which come from the four faculties.

• The team use Alteryx to collect, blend, verify and analyse data from multiple sources within this tight timescale
• There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every year or for each new workflow, liberating the team to work on other important projects
• Creating a culture of analytic excellence through Data Quality (DQ) reports for faculty administration colleagues

• HESES Return filed in 7 days