Ellucian Banner vs. SAP for Higher Education and Research

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.

Incentivized

When I was at university, I used this product, which was quite new to me at the time. Since starting at my new institution, I've had the opportunity to learn more. It contains a lot of features and resources that facilitate integration with other systems and improve the efficiency of procedures. The software is not the simplest to use or comprehend. It has many features, making it challenging to learn everything. I had to enlist assistance.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The concur platform integrates all the necessary steps for reservation, expense reports, and reimbursement.
• It has customer supports that can easily be reached by emails.
• It emails the users for any important process steps.

Incentivized

• One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down.
• I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate.
• I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily.

Incentivized

• Error Handling : Sometimes it created some issues where there was not enough explanation. But I think it is mostly related with the consulting company making poor development.
• In every period, when students tries to access to the system all together and sign up for the courses, it always crashed for minimum a week. I think it requires Load Balancing.
• The options we used were very limited there, I think there is more capabilities for collaboration is still needed. For example, exams, homeworks etc can be managed by itç

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It's pretty much up all the time.

Incentivized

Has gotten much better due to new hardware.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

With its many partnerships and connections with other software used in higher education and research, SAP may assist institutions in streamlining their operations and enhancing access functionality. I chose SAP because I am already familiar with the other SAP products. I couldn't think of any other tools which stacks up against SAP for Higher Education and Research

Incentivized

being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• There were a lot of other platforms also used along with SAP for Higher Education and Research, I believe reducing these needs would be very important overall.
• At the background, there are a lot of important functionalities reside like Accounting, HR etc. and this is where SAP for Higher Education and Research comes very powerful I believe
• Cloud version would be a lot useful especially considering that, user logins are always seasonal so extra help always needed to balance the loads in the network.

Incentivized