The Ellucian Banner platform is the Student Information System and Enterprise Resource Planning product that Liberty University uses. Supporting Banner is a critical function of Analytics and Decision Support (ADS) since nearly every department uses Banner in some fashion. ADS works with business units to ensure that customers can easily access and manipulate their data in Banner. The Banner platform integrates with many other products, this allows ADS to deliver custom and baseline solutions to meet the University’s needs. Supporting Banner is one of the most important functions of ADS.

Additional Banner Support

  • Permissions – Approve permissions and determine which permissions groups and forms employees need access to within Banner. Our team works with the SFS directors to define Banner security roles, groups, and classes, as well as to approve SFS permissions requests and act as liaisons for permissions requests from outside departments.
  • Upgrades – Provide testing and verification of critical forms and processes inside of Banner during upgrade cycles. We review Ellucian’s release documentation to communicate important updates back to our customer group as well as test new or fixed functionality to help continue to provide a consistent user experience for SFS staff. Furthermore, we coordinate customer testing and signoff on upgrade weekends and act as liaisons between SFS testers and other IT employees.
  • Custom Banner Process – Create Banner processes that automate test scores, auto registration and drops, auto holds, posting grades, course leveling, advisor assignments, course restrictions (campus, prerequisites), grade rolling, and GPA calculations. Departments can utilize baseline and custom Banner jobs to improve processing times.
  • Automation – Set up scheduled Banner jobs to reduce the processing burden for University departments. Scheduling Banner jobs provides automated processes to manage customer’s data without the need for manual processing. Using a mixture of custom and baseline Banner jobs, our team automates updates to students’ accounts to provide a better customer service experience for students and allow SFS staff to most effectively use their time. This is often done in conjunction with the JAMS job scheduler.
  • Setup – The Financial Aid module requires a large amount of setup from year to year in order to allow the SFS division to continue processing student financial aid through Banner. Our team is responsible for the initial setup of these items each year as well as occasional maintenance updates.
  • Troubleshooting – Troubleshoot technical issues within Banner and research cases on Ellucian’s support hub for information regarding the issues, updates, and any work-around that can be temporarily implemented by the user, then relay that information to the necessary departments. Our team is often the first point of contact for end users in SFS experiencing some issue with Banner access, forms, or jobs. We make use of Ellucian’s support site for research purposes and assist SFS employees with troubleshooting issues they are experiencing. If those issues persist, we are also the liaisons between SFS and Ellucian and are the primary point of contact for each party in Ellucian’s case submission and change request processes.
  • Data Entry – Provide solutions to preform data entry in batches. This speeds up processing time since departments will not have to manually input large amounts of data into Banner.
  • Self-Services – Our team maintains several setup pieces for Self-Service Financial Aid, including turning links to forms on and off, making text changes in Self-Service, and assisting in setting up the College Financing Plan.