Big Data specialist training and report automation: How we helped a university create an information processing complex

The client: A leading technical university

As part of this project, we are collaborating with a leading technical university with over 19,000 students. It specializes in providing high-quality and competitive education and research services.

The university has its own information system that ensures an efficient learning process. This system stores all the data about students, teachers, scholarships, salaries, and classes. Like any educational institution, our client regularly provides various statistical forms and reports to a higher governmental authority. They approached us to automate this process to eliminate human errors and decrease the time for report preparation.

In addition, the university aims to take a leading position among educational institutions specializing in training big data professionals and to improve its rating to other universities.

Our client had three main goals:

• To ensure the operational activities of the university by automating the process of preparing and providing statistical reports to the corresponding ministry.
• To enrich their own knowledge, improve the level of data analytics, and become a leading university in the field of big data in their region.
• To start training their own big data specialists.

To achieve these goals, we split them into the following tasks:

• To develop and implement a unified corporate data warehouse for collecting, processing, storing, analyzing, and visualizing information circulating in existing information systems.
• To develop reports for visualization, and providing statistical information with data extraction and filtering.
• To create a training program for mastering practical skills in big data management technologies.
• To prepare methodological materials (lectures, practical classes) in big data and transfer knowledge to the client's teachers.

The corporate data warehouse was expected to provide high availability and performance in data processing, confidentiality, integrity of processed and stored information, horizontal scalability, and a technological basis for big data.

Data management and reporting

At the start, our specialists designed the structure of the university's data management system for 3,000 users of different levels. They also developed and implemented reports for the ministry with information on the number of students, teachers, staff, scholarships, salaries, organization expenses, and other operational details.

Our team then focused on creating an educational program that would enable the university to acquire recognition in the big data field. We helped the university gain an advantage over graduates from other universities by teaching students what big data is and providing them with practical training on big data tools and data engineering.

Initially, we agreed with the client on the educational program. However, during the project, our specialists, who closely collaborated with university professors, realized that in addition to lectures, practical exercises were also necessary for the implementation of the methodological part of the educational program. As a result, we provided students with a full set of theoretical learning materials and practical tools for working with big data.

So far, we've transferred knowledge and experience to the client on using the solution, enabling the university to independently manage the comprehensive data management solution.