St. Edward's University's Drive for Pervasive Connectivity and Efficiency Through Integration

Business Goals

Shortly after organizers cancelled Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in March 2020, the city’s St. Edward’s University closed its campus and cancelled in-person spring semester classes. Budget cuts and layoffs followed, including some in the school’s already lean IT department.

The university needed to pivot from its normal operating model to one that could accommodate remote admissions, instruction, and student engagement. This required enhanced efficiency through best-in-class integration. Luckily, St. Edward’s already had the Boomi AtomSphere Platform in place.

Integration Challenges

St. Edward’s first implemented the Boomi AtomSphere Platform in 2017 to connect Banner, a higher education ERP system, with several smaller vendor products, including StarRez for housing, NuPark for parking transactions, and Transact for door access.

Just before the pandemic, the university began implementing Salesforce Advisor Link, which required more integrations with Banner. For example, St. Edward’s needed a way to identify and quickly process refunds for the rooms and meal plans of students no longer on campus.

How Boomi Helped

To help St. Edward’s and its students, the university used the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to:

• Connect systems
• Accelerate ordinary processes
• Move critical data where it was needed

For example, IT worked with admissions on Fall 2021 applications. Staffers had been manually entering data from nearly 10,000 application records into Banner.

With the Boomi AtomSphere Platform’s low-code capabilities, it took only two weeks for IT to create five tables of data that synced with Banner, saving many hours of data entry.

Results

The pandemic has revealed many opportunities to connect back office processes and systems to make operations run more smoothly in:

• Maintaining health and safety
• Providing instruction
• Stabilizing revenue

Since the university’s budget is derived primarily from tuition, admissions-related processes and data receive a lot of IT’s attention. Efficient processes that run smoothly ensure applicants have the most integrated experience possible prior to becoming students, while integration with Salesforce Advisor Link helps with engagement during student orientation and beyond.