Case Study: Wayne State University achieves self‑service, student‑level analytics and faster reporting with SAS Visual Analytics on Hadoop

Wayne State University pairs SAS® Visual Analytics with Hadoop to make data-informed decisions

Wayne State University, a 27,000‑student institution in Detroit, needed a better way to give administrators timely, student‑level analytics. Existing options—static preformatted reports, a difficult BI tool, or slow IR report requests—left users without the self‑service, drillable data needed for operational and strategic decisions.

By running SAS Visual Analytics on Hadoop, Wayne State delivered interactive dashboards and drill‑down views that let departments explore enrollments, cohorts, budgets and student performance. The IR team rebuilt 80% of legacy reports in five months (work that had taken five years originally), enabled automated overnight queries, removed processing bottlenecks, and produced substantial time savings for IT and IR while empowering stakeholders with fast, actionable insights.

Wayne State University

Adam Perkins

Senior Web Developer and Technical Analyst