Company: Reynolds Community College
Company background: The college served more than 11,000 students during the 2021-22 academic year. It also assisted more than 5,500 learners through its workforce development division, the Community College Workforce Alliance.
Contact: Melanie Boynton
Title: Director of Institutional Research and Analytics
Country: USA
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
Our college has four campuses with numerous buildings and hundreds of rooms. Decision makers in technology, facilities management, and academic affairs needed a clear and accurate picture of how well efficiently these spaces were being used for academic instruction.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
Using SAS Visual Analytics, we identified spaces that were not being used to their fullest capacity. We designed a dashboard that calculated the percentage of available time that each room was used for instruction. Rooms with a low capacity utilization rate were investigated for re-purposing.
What were the results or outcomes?
The college re-purposing spaces based on the capacity utilization rates thus saving the college close to $1M originally earmarked for upgrading equipment / technology.
Why is this approach innovative?
The college had never before used data and visualization to measure the efficiency of instructional space utilization.
