Tools that Power Institutional Intelligence
We provide the infrastructure and insight higher education needs to thrive: automated data pipelines, dashboards, and warehousing built for scale. Plaid combines strategic analytics planning based on your unique situation and modern technology to enable smarter enrolment management and operational decisions.
See How We Move Institutions from Data Overload to Insight
Data Solutions
With Plaid Integrate, you get to choose just what is relevant for you. Choose from one or more of the following data stack elements or areas for support, and we'll build an automated solution that is easy to use and integrates smoothly with your existing tools.
Data Integration & Warehousing
- Transfer and transform your data from your student information system to a data warehouse structured to enable deep research dives, track changes over time, and power fast data analytics.
- Extract, aggregate, and transfer course schedule data like instructor assignments and cross-listed sections and upload course details to your Learning Management System
- Integrate data from Microsoft SharePoint lists and spreadsheets with your database tables to create comprehensive, detailed datasets
Data Pipelines & Automation
- Automate manual and repetitive data validation and processing tasks
- Schedule resource-heavy data transfer and processing tasks to happen automatically during system quiet times
- Schedule dataset refreshes overnight or hourly so your leaders get timely, trusted data dashboards without requesting an update
Data Dashboards and Analytics
- Executive level dashboards empower insightful decision-making without getting bogged down in the details
- Comprehensive and secure dashboards, where users get the right level of access for their role with the same ease of use as others
- Move your compliance and accountability spreadsheet reports to a business intelligence tool to monitor your progress year-round
Data Analytics Strategy
- Understand your current state of data and analytics use and get recommendations for how you can use data to support your strategic plan initiatives
- Identify and organize competing priorities into a roadmap for scalable growth that aligns with institutional timelines
- Consider alternative frameworks and approaches to modernize your data analytics and reporting program
- Empower enrolment planning with a strategic approach to shared data analytics that enables cross-unit collaboration, establishes a common language and level of data literacy, identifies data governance roles and responsibilities, and defines key data points and metrics for the institution
Why Plaid
Our data integration solutions are built with your tools and team, for your institutional context, and with your long-term independence in mind. Unlike other firms, we don’t lock you into hosting contracts or withhold the technical builds of the data stack keeping you from managing it on your own. Instead, we:
- Build with your tools, on your environment: We use your existing tech, cloud or on-premises servers, data warehouses, and business intelligence tools to create sustainable, future-proof solutions. If your data stack has a gap, we provide recommendations for tools that complement your existing suite.
- Empower your people: From training sessions to documentation, we ensure you and your staff are confident and capable of managing and expanding on the solutions we've built together.
- No Vendor Lock-in: When the engagement ends, you get to choose your next steps. Whether you're ready to take over managing the data warehouse and workflow automations, or looking for extended support and maintenance time, Plaid works with you to ensure a successful project hand-off, including technical documentation, scripts, workflow and dashboard files.
We Get SEM Data
Strategic enrolment management is more than just numbers—it’s a dynamic puzzle of metrics (such as full-time equivalency, retention rate, admissions, and course outcomes), demographics (such as domestic/international visa status, study area, financial aid recipient) and institutional vision and context across time. At Plaid Analytics, we recognize the challenges higher education leaders face and the critical importance of connecting every data point—from who your students are and what they do to the services they’ll use and beyond.
Our solutions empower you with the insights you need to make informed, confident decisions in an increasingly complex landscape.
~Dr. Tara Hyland-Russell, Vice President Academic and Research, Northern Lights College
With the Plaid approach, we’ll help you:
- Focus on meaning: Empower your analysts to concentrate on what the data reveals instead of spending time on data management with an automated data pipeline.
- Engage all stakeholders: With a dashboard suite built to include high-level trends and the ability to dig into detail, we ensure each of your key stakeholder groups has access to data to answer their most-frequent questions or dive deep into the research.
- Support underrepresented students: Group your data by demographics, such as ethnicity or Indigenous status to identify opportunities for student success supports.
- Optimize enrolment: Track how class enrolment has changed by modality and optimize opportunities for students and faculty.
We are Higher Education Systems Experts
Working with the major Student Information Systems and integrations with a variety of systems surrounding them, we help you scale your reporting and analytics capabilities fast.
- We understand the importance of data security. Not only are our solutions accurate and fast, they also keep your data protected. From our data warehouses to dashboards, our solutions provide access control to ensure individuals have only the data and views required for their role.
- We understand the importance of timeliness. To make enrolment management decisions effectively and quickly, a data stack must be able to automatically record new information in the data store and update end-user dashboards automatically, to provide decision-makers with timely, accurate, and actionable analytics.
- We understand the importance of a single, shared institutional truth. From enrolment management to budgeting to facility operations, strategic decision-makers need a comprehensive, reliable central and shared source to access common and specific metrics. A reporting data warehouse is the foundational layer for all strategic, collaborative and data-driven decision-making. We can connect your business intelligence tools to the data warehouse to not only ensure role-based and row-level security, but centralize all key metrics, data visualizations and common data points for a comprehensive and trustworthy source of truth.
Systems We Work With
Our technology expertise includes common student information systems, CRMS, modern cloud platforms, and numerous home-built systems. We'll even ingest your spreadsheets.
