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Customer Profile

Founded In 1865, Cornell University is a private endowed university, a member of the Ivy League/Ancient Eight, and a partner of the State University of New York. Cornell has been described as the first truly American university because of its founders’ revolutionarily egalitarian and practical vision of higher education, and is dedicated to its land-grant mission of outreach and public service. With fourteen Colleges and Schools, Cornell serves over 2,700 faculty and over 20,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

Customer Case Description

Cornell has a large KPI (Key Performance Indicators) initiative for the 11 colleges in Ithaca, its main campus area. For many years, the Deans and the business officers have wanted metrics at their finger-tips. Armed with the right information, they would be able to run Cornell more effectively in terms of serving students better and using resources more effectively.

But, historically, each college used its own method for producing KPI reports, resulting in the duplication of efforts and a decrease in productivity.

The Solution

Tableau is the centerpiece of Cornell’s KPI system that is used by Cornell’s business decision-makers to visualize a collection of functional and cross-functional indicators to quickly and easily analyze trend and point-in-time questions. Deans and Business Officers across Cornell’s 11 colleges will use information from this system to assess the present state of business, measure performance and progress toward goals and inform decisions on future courses of action. The initial project will cover 100 users, and over time Cornell plans to expand its deployment to more than 1,000 users across the institution.

With Tableau, Cornell will be able to more efficiently and effectively analyze and share important information across the organization, resulting in an estimated 50- to 70-percent decrease in time spent producing KPI reports. Based on the early success of Cornell’s KPI initiative, the College’s highest priority IT project, other project teams are already evaluating how Tableau can meet their needs.

“Tableau’s powerful analytics let us easily tell the story of what has previously happened, is currently happening, and the ability to project what is likely to happen in our business.” stated Cindy Sedlacek, Technical Lead for the KPI Initiative and Director of Data Administration and Reporting for Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. “Tableau Desktop’s ease-of-use and rich visualizations combined with Tableau Server’s ability to immediately publish those visualizations made it the all-around winning choice” continued Cindy.