It can be a real juggling act
Balancing budgets, tuition fees, competition for students and the quality of education and/or research. All this while still attempting to grow and meet community goals with limited resources. It’s a tough job. Thankfully, there’s a way to make it a whole lot easier with our University Predictive Model and University Management Model.
Creating a Predictive Model from the ground up
Traditionally, universities have used ‘Top Down’ models that utilise a range of source data to build a view of the university.
We have approached things differently. Our Predictive Model is a ‘Bottom Up’ model. It uses the mathematical correlations identified in the historical cost models to determine the relationships between changes in student numbers and the various resources required to support those students and produce the necessary university outcomes.
Our Predictive Model allows university management to estimate the direct personnel and financial resources needed to deliver the required teaching and research load, as well as all the corporate support and overhead requirements.
Our Predictive Model can estimate the impact of:
Our Predictive Model analyses the results by the estimated financial and human resource requirements, as well as by:
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Funding type
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Academic career type (undergraduate, postgraduate, higher degree by research, etc)
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Student type (Government funded, fee paying international, fee paying domestic, etc)
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Campus
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Delivery type (on campus, online, offshore, etc)
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Profitability/margin/break-even point
Real World Expertise
Our process for developing predictive models has been refined over a decade of building large scale models for the United States Navy, Universities, Australian Aged Care and other industries. And now it’s specifically tailored to the business needs of Australian Universities.
So talk to us today and we’ll show you how quickly we can develop a Predictive Model to estimate your university’s future.
To download a brochure of our Predictive Model solution for Higher Education please click on the following links:
United States: Predictive Model US.pdf
Australia: Predictive Model AU.pdf
University Management Model
The University Management Model is a financial modeling solution for Higher Education administration. The solution combines Software as a Service, methodology and consulting expertise to rapidly implement (within 6 weeks) an enterprise-wide financial model providing detailed costs and margins per Faculty / School right down to individual subjects/units taught. Combined with powerful multi-dimensional analysis capabilities, this solution enables detailed analysis of the financial health of the University or College.
The Challenge
Universities globally are facing new challenges in the 21st Century - increasing competition, brand differentiation, budget pressures, international benchmarks (no longer local or national), rising standards due to globalization, and increased private sector partnerships. All the pressures impose on University leadership a requirement to become more management and business focused and to create an agile organization that can adapt readily to these challenges. A fundamental component to this overall agile organization is an underlying, flexible cost and performance management solution and Activity Based Costing (ABC) is an appropriate fit to help University leadership meet these challenges.
The Solution
We have created a solution specifically for Colleges and Universities that can be customized and implemented at any Institute of Higher Education. This allows a University to rapidly implement an ABC solution and specifically to target some key pieces of Management Intelligence like the fully burdened cost per student per unit or the overhead costs associated with research.
Once the
cost per student has been calculated, then this can be combined with
Revenue per Student per Unit to calculate the
Margin per Unit. This is certainly not done with the intent of closing down units with minimal margins or those that are a cost burden, rather to increase margins by either:
- Increasing student numbers in high margin schools
- Cut costs in low margin areas
- Calculate the break-even point (unit is no longer a cost burden after X students) and focus on attracting the appropriate number of students to each unit to achieve appropriate margins
We can provide a full turnkey solution including software, methodology, training, implementation, data analysis and reporting. All of these services can be provided or just portions of it.
We can provide:
- Strategic Direction
- Development of methodology / business rules
- Implementation services
- Business modeling
- Software implementation / creation
- Report / dash board requirements definition and development
- Predictive models requirements definition and development
Our primary experience has been in the Government and Not-for-Profit arena, hence we are well versed in the issues confronting both types of organizations.
We can draw on this experience to ensure the implementation is rapid and addresses the requirements of University Administrators.
Within the University environment ABC can be implemented and cost analysis performed on a number of different University products or services such as:
- Research undertaken
- Commercial contracts
- Regional engagement
- Teaching Curriculum
- Other ‘out-of-scope’ products
The Approach
Starting with the ACE template, the implementation team would investigate the available source systems with the objective to source and load as much data as possible from these existing systems, preferably with an automated and easily repeatable process. There are five basic systems that a Higher Education Institution would expect to draw data from to build the model.
- Finance / Accounting
- Payroll / Human Resources
- Asset management / depreciation
- Student Enrollment / Curriculum
- Time Tabling (Units delivered when, where, by whom, in what format)
The following diagram outlines the basic structure of a generic ABC University model, simply click on the image to enlarge it in a new window.