University of Otago

The University is now able to manage the information in its database far more efficiently, providing optimum performance to its users and increasing productivity across the board. Using Archiving, the University has largely improved performance on perpetual ledger enquiries, whilst still providing online access to all data.

The Archiving module has also allowed the University’s staff to significantly save time; increasing efficiency by reducing the time spent finding information from minutes down to seconds. With this time-saving benefit and increased functionality of the system, staff have become much more satisfied with work processes.

The University of Otago was maintaining financial and transactional data at very high volumes. Over time, the volumes grew to the point where relevant information was hard to find and access, causing frustration among employees.

The University was already using TechnologyOne Financials to deliver enterprise-wide control and integration of financial information essential to the University’s strategic decision-making. With the successful implementation of this technology, the University turned to the software provider a second time to implement its Archiving module to solve the data problem.

The Archiving module helps maintain optimum performance of data enquiries, reports and system upgrades. It promotes the efficient use of software infrastructure by archiving transactional information in a separate storage location. By doing this, the University’s software is able to run significantly faster as the system is not clogged with millions of financial transactions.

University Financial Systems Analyst Gordon Hudson said before the implementation of Archiving, the University’s high volume of transactions was starting to create performance issues, with staff losing valuable time searching for data.

“As an organisation, we have archived more than 24 million transactions and we try to keep our live transactions between 15 to 18 million, which was something we couldn’t do prior to implementing Archiving,” Mr Hudson said.

“That meant when a staff member needed to find certain information, they had to search through a tremendous amount of data, which was wasting valuable time and effort. Archiving has solved this problem, ensuring we reach our archived transactions target. In fact, we are currently sitting at 16 million live transactions, which is ideal.”