Ellucian offers Banner educational ERP, including its student management system emphasizing control and reporting of process-oriented facets of education such as grading and attendance.
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FACTS Student Information System
Score 8.2 out of 10
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FACTS Student Information System (formerly RenWeb) is a Student Information System that handles admissions, student information, billing, report cards, grading, attendance, and parent access, among others. FACTS is a property of Nelnet Business Solutions.
As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.
We base our entire student data on the Student ID that is produced in FACTS. We create user accounts for technology and online textbooks as well as their lunch account, all based on the Student ID. We also can run many different reports using the SID as the data constant and all the other information variables are available as needed to report.
I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.
We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.
It's user-friendly, the customer service is great, and we have a significant amount of time invested in training our faculty and staff to use many aspects of FACTS within their areas of responsibility. I really like the variety of reports I can generate which gives important data to our administration and Board.
You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works
Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.
PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries. PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner. PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.
Switched from Blackbaud to RenWeb now FACTS. We made the change for affordability and because more software components were included. Blackbaud required the purchase of multiple additional modules.
There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background.
The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner