Case Study: University of West Florida achieves faster reporting and improved data quality with Tableau Software

University of West Florida Saves Time, Improves Data Quality with Tableau

The University of West Florida (UWF), which serves more than 12,000 students, faced a major system migration when its legacy student data system was due to be retired. More than 40 years of records—including 1.5 million alumni course entries—needed to be quality-checked and converted, dozens of bespoke reporting interfaces had to be recreated, and the IT team had to provide complete, current student views while data resided in both legacy SQL Server and the new Oracle system during a phased conversion.

UWF implemented Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server as the reporting front end, using Tableau workbooks in place of custom report development to cut roughly 4–5 weeks of work per application. Tableau’s data blending provided unified views across databases, made data errors immediately visible (for example, a 393 GPA was corrected to 3.93), improved data quality and decision-making, freed developer time, and drove broad user adoption of visual reports.

University of West Florida

Melanie Haveard

Chief Technology Officer