Tribal Sits – AFD Refiner

AFD Software Refiner Demonstration


Watch a demonstration of AFD Software being used on SITS client below:

Northumbria University

We spoke to Ben McWhinnie, Data Manager to find out how AFD Software’s address management software is helping the University maintain data quality and the benefits of AFD Software. Ben McWhinnie and his team run AFD refiner against their students address data on the 15th of each month. “We have all our students term time and home addresses and run the data through Refiner, the non-matched addresses or addresses that may contain inaccuracies are highlighted by Refiner and passed onto faculty in a report. Faculty then sense check the student’s address that has been flagged and manually update it.

 

HESA – the Higher Education Statistics Agency is the central data collection service for higher education in the UK. Each September, all Universities are required to submit a HESA return which contains information on: Students, qualifiers and graduates. Academic and non-academic staff. Universities and other higher education providers.

The level of funding received from HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) is determined by data contained within the HESA return. Teaching Quality Information, performance indicators widening participation (increasing student numbers). National Student Survey and the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) both rely on the HESA student return for data.

 

It is a statutory requirement that all universities must report data accurately in their HESA returns. Consequences for inaccuracy in the returns can include fines and less funding which will have a knock on effect on services offered. Data submitted to HESA is used when determining a rank on the University League Table meaning data inaccuracies could affect positioning which has a knock on effect on student on boarding.

 

How does Refiner help?

HESA Returns take place each September, HESA have a set of rules for data, if the data does not meet these rules the data is rejected which leads to manual interventions. In the case of student address data, incorrect addresses i.e. poorly formatted or containing missing or incorrect address information will be rejected and staff will have to manually fix each of these.

Ben continuesRefiner helps us minimise the amount of non-clean addresses that would be ejected as errors by HESA, by running the process monthly we are constantly reducing the number of errors throughout the year rather than having one big clean-up operation around September.

Without Refiner we would be relying on our data sources of data being perfect, a lot of our students data comes from UCAS and the address data for students comes in a mess containing both mistakes and formatting errors, we can’t change how it comes to us so we have to accept it, Refiner saves a lot of manual intervention by cleaning these addresses before they enter our systems.

When students re-enrol with us we have Postcode Plus throughout our University systems meaning students cannot enter an incorrect address and this process is watertight, the errors mainly come from first year enrolment information we receive from UCAS.

We would strongly encourage any other University to move to AFD Software. Technical support is good, and they have a strong knowledge of Tribal products across the board.

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