Australian University Reduces TCSI Report Processing by 99.9%

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS), one of Australia’s leading universities specializing in practice-oriented learning, is home to 45,000 students and 4,000 staff. Like many universities during the pandemic, UTS had to rapidly transition to a hybrid learning model that included classroom and online service delivery. The IT department employs around 300 staff and is responsible for the digital experiences supporting the people, processes, and culture at the University. “We look after about 80 applications, ranging from enterprise applications down to small bespoke things, plus all the Oracle and SQL databases across the University,” said Robert Laws, Application Enterprise Support Manager, UTS.

During its transition to a hybrid learning model, the University relied on Rimini Street to provide support for Oracle EBS, including tax, legal, and regulatory updates, strategy and support for its SQL databases, and enhanced their cybersecurity position by leveraging the Rimini Protect™ solution. Rimini Street gained the respect and trust of UTS by proving its expertise and reliability. This was exemplified when the University’s integrator was flooded, resulting in the blow out of their systems. The Rimini Street team provided expert database support in quickly rebuilding lost indexes, restoring full capability of UTS with incredible speed and accuracy.

New government regulations yield new challenges

Facing new compliance rules for the collection and reporting of student data via Tertiary Collection of Student Information (TCSI), UTS was mandated to update the reporting speed from monthly to weekly.

The data for reporting included student, course, and unit enrollments for over 40,000 students. The initial reports took more than 30 hours to run, with some running for up to five days. The time and resources needed to produce weekly reports of such heavy data loads and criticality, paired with the time and resources needed to review and audit the information, demanded reporting move much faster.

If they failed to meet the reporting timeframes, UTS would be assessed stiff fines and risk significant loss of revenue. “We could lose funding from the government if we’re non-compliant. Billions of dollars were at stake,” said Laws.

Rimini Consult, the professional services arm of Rimini Street, was called in to review the database scheme, network traffic, and any other factors impacting the reporting system’s performance. The Rimini Consult team also filled critical skills gaps for experienced Oracle engineers to analyze and troubleshoot the system. “In less than 20 days of work, Rimini Consult was able to reduce our data reporting time from 30 hours to under two minutes saving an incredible amount of time and resources for UTS – their SLAs are incredible, as is the accuracy of their solution,” reported Laws. Overall, that represents a 99.9% reduction in the time to process the reports.

The optimizations also freed up resources. “We’re definitely saving a huge amount of effort, time, and the equivalent of one FTE based on the original timeframes that we’re co-running,” said Laws. And UTS is now over 90% compliant backed by Rimini Consult’s expertise in helping to speed up the report runtimes to allow time to audit and fix errors for compliance reviews ahead of the weekly report submissions. “If that report was still running slow, we’d still be day one, non-compliant,” explained Laws.