Ellucian

Opmerkingen: Negative, frankly. While helpful and polite, the team seems too inexperienced to be of much help. In fact, Ellucian seems to cause most of the problems themselves through self-inflicted wounds. Each update or patch implements some new ‘improvement’ that breaks most workflows and processes built for the previous version. As such, the hope to get a slight improvement ends up costing weeks of manpower to fix everything else in the test environment over and over again.

Pluspunten: Ideally, when functional, the functionality between Ellucian products can be helpful. We use Banner and eRecruit CRM. We expected the CRM/ERP integration to be the best selling point when choosing the CRM application.

Minpunten: Despite being the same company, the products are not as seemless as we felt it should be. It took well over a year of implementation of the eRecruit CRM to customize it to fit with the Banner ERP. Even then, we still find issues where things are not being converted from one to the other well. One example, on the CRM, GB is the country abrieviation for the UK (Great Britain), but in the ERP, this is shown as Gabon. I’ve wasted so much time programming and converting little things like this that I find it hard to believe they were released by the same company.

Pluspunten: Ellucian Banner is the platform that I have used at my previous and current university, while working in financial aid. I have only ever used Banner so I do not have another platform to compare it to. This system has been very beneficial in automating the processing for financial aid. I have used this program for over 7 years. All student, and employee, related information is stored in one location and necessary processing can be handled with Banner. Financially and academic based, this program has helped be the "one-stop-shop" for all information for our large student base. Banner 9 has made the screens easier to use for new users (due to acronyms) but Banner 8 was the most efficient program I have ran.

Minpunten: Banner 9 seems to have a lag between screens that has not yet been improved. Being web-based, it has really slowed down or processing. There are glitches that are quickly fixed but there seems to be more issues with this new Banner program than what we ever dealt with while using Banner 8.

Opmerkingen: Overall we are very satisfied with Ellucian. It provides our business and finance team books that are used for easy reporting and a clean UI interface.

Pluspunten: I have been a user of Ellucian banner for over six years and have been through countless updates. The product keeps improving where I think things are already good, and is quick to address current issues. Our organization loves the fact that we can use a web based version as well. Additionally, the UI is very clean and I can understand what is affecting our balance sheet, income statement, ect., all at a quick glance. Finally, the reports that are generated from Ellucian are very helpful and make it so I can create accurate reconciliations.

Minpunten: The one problem we run into with Ellucian is that training to use the product is difficult. Many screens have specific acronyms to access them, which is hard for people to remember. However, they have introduced a search function that allows you to use words and it acts more like a google search, which is helpful to find what you need.

Opmerkingen: Ellucian is the big player in the higher ed SIS market. This directly leads to complacency and a lack on innovation in their products. When Ellucian SIS works, it is a mediocre software at best. Hopefully they recognize this and improve their product.

Pluspunten: Being a relational database, reporting out if is pretty straightforward. Querying is SQL based. The end-user and admin support community is active and very willing to help with questions and problems.

Minpunten: The interface is simply clunky. Archaic layouts, limited customization without large developer resources, poor technical support from Ellucian, and patches that end up breaking more than they fix are some of the many issues with Ellucian SIS. I have worked in multiple modules and all seem to be equally as bad. Admin guide documentation is present but there is a huge lack of functional documentation regarding how changes in tables affect other tables.

Pluspunten: The updates that came with Banner 9 have made it much more user-friendly, although there's still a long way to go in this department. It has become much easier to search for various Banner forms, a feature that was lacking in previous iterations of Banner. The overall look is sleeker than the previous version and navigation within the forms has been made somewhat simpler with the reorganization of the page and inclusion of tool dropdowns.

Minpunten: Occasional glitches disrupt the daily workflow. Many processes are still not as intuitive as they could be, especially when it comes to entering multiple invoices with separate FOAPAL strings. There is some difficulty getting Banner to talk to other software programs. While exporting data is easier than in previous versions of Banner, some print screen attempts go better than others.