Case Study: Fordham University gains campus-wide self-service analytics and major BI cost savings with Microsoft Power BI

University empowers more decision makers with easy-to-use data analytics

Fordham University needed to give hundreds of administrators timely, accurate data to inform enrollment, budgeting, and student-success decisions, but its legacy BI tool was expensive and limited to a few licensed users, producing many static reports and conflicting spreadsheets. To broaden access and speed insights, the university adopted Microsoft Power BI (hosted on Microsoft Azure and connected to its SQL Server data warehouse) so more staff could self-serve analytics without overburdening the four-person data analytics team.

Using Microsoft Power BI, Fordham moved from evaluation to a pilot for 50 administrators in three months and then scaled broadly, enabling interactive reports and dashboards from a single data source and adding Azure Machine Learning and R Server for predictive analytics. The university reports Power BI is 200 percent less expensive than its previous BI technologies, saved about 200 IT hours per year (a 20% efficiency gain), accelerated time-to-value, improved data security with Azure encryption, and helped administrators make more consistent, data-driven decisions.

Fordham University

Rashid Khan

Director of Analytics