A 2001 merger with Campus Fund Raisers made On Campus Marketing (OCM) the nation’s premier campus fund raising company. 

OCM partners with a variety of college-level organizations, including alumni associations, residence hall associations, housing offices and campus bookstores. Members of these organizations, both students and families, can order from OCM's catalog of Care Packages and other goodies to make college life more comfortable for a student while benefiting college organizations. OCM now has endorsed relationships with more than 900 colleges and universities, student organizations and alumni associations, and processes about a half-million transactions a year. 

OCM's acquisition by Student Advantage, Inc. in 2001 further strengthened the company’s position but also complicated its data management situation. 

An open-minded approach to a closed system.

In recent years, Ecometry applications on the HP3000 powered OCM’s back office. Ecometry would certainly remain their transaction system in the near term. But as reliable and powerful as Ecometry was, OCM’s system had two increasingly nagging problems. Ecometry did not provide the flexible, real-time reporting capability that the CEO and CFO wanted. And it wasn’t integrating with the SQL Server based decisions system that OCM had built. 

OCM decided both issues could be addressed if a way existed to detect changes as they were made to the Ecometry data and load them into a central SQL Server data warehouse, where reporting would be easier. Likewise, Web server integration would be facilitated. 

Until then, OCM would have to continue performing overnight data dumps to the SQL server database. That was a problem, because the Ecometry IMAGE database was large, with dumps approaching 8 gigabytes and taking 6 or 7 hours to move and process. Worse, the reports could be up to 500 pages, not too handy for users wanting quick decision-making. 

OCM tried several approaches for IMAGE data movement into SQL Server: ODBC, Suprtool, and MS DTS. OCM was not happy with the results. The process took too long, was prone to crash and didn't offer what the users wanted.

OCM does their homework and finds BridgeWare.

“When we started looking for something better, we found BridgeWare. There wasn't anything else like it,” says Daniel Cohen-Dumani, OCM Vice-president of Information Services. “My only regret is that we didn’t have BridgeWare’s data transformation capabilities from the beginning, so we could do the job properly from the outset.” 

The process now has a staging area in SQL Server BridgeWare updates as transactions pop up in the HP3000 IMAGE database. OCM reports off the staging area directly and also creates multiple Microsoft OLAP cubes that are updated daily, hourly or half-hourly, depending on the need.

Now OCM does most of its transactional reporting through either Crystal Reports against the staging area or Excel against the cubes. And now end users are using Business Objects, with its Excel interface for complex real-time reporting. According to Mr. Cohen-Dumani, “BridgeWare gives us two things: accurate up-to-the-minute business intelligence and reliability.” 

To integrate the data from previously independent companies and enhance enterprise-wide reporting from this data volume is a big job. But with BridgeWare helping, the whole project was accomplished in 3 man-months of effort. And Andrew Pilz, OCM’s lead on the project, did the bulk of the work single-handed. 

About Student Advantage

Founded in 1992, Student Advantage, Inc. (NASDAQ: STAD) is the media and commerce connection for millions of college students and the businesses and universities that serve them. Student Advantage reaches students online through its award-winning Web sites, collegeclub.com and studentadvantage.com, and offline through the Student Advantage Membership and SA Cash Programs, and OCM Direct. The company serves its corporate partners by providing sophisticated integrated marketing solutions as well as events and promotion services through SA Marketing Group. Additionally, Student Advantage supplies information services, Internet content and data management services to colleges and universities. 

Contact Daniel Cohen-Dumani: dcohen@studentadvantage.com