Building a ‘Super System’ for Student Planning + Income Modelling

The University of Nottingham's planning and performance team initially took advantage of Alteryx to clean and prepare the data for Tableau by completely scrapping the student elements of the data warehouse and rebuilding a new dataset in Alteryx, comprising 10 years of student data. Today, all analysis and forecasting for student planning and funding is performed through Alteryx. The university’s departments are broken down into 56 budget units, all of which want to understand how the 15 different income streams come in. Add 24 student types, all the courses offered and there are over eight billion cells to be modelled. Drilling into the student history reveals current, returning and new student numbers, what they’ll study and expected income from fees and other funding. The team then adds more complex querying to provide deeper insights, such as who’s full- or part-time, undergraduate, postgraduate or postgraduate-research, which students are domestic and overseas, who is joining partway through courses and so on. Once the cycle is complete, the results are transferred to Tableau for checking before reports are distributed to university departments or data is submitted to HESA.