For many students, financial aid is not a convenience. It is the reason college is possible at all. When aid data is delayed, incomplete, or hard to trust, it can become a make-or-break issue, affecting whether students can stay enrolled, plan payments, or move through the semester with confidence. In this project, our customer needed to modernize an existing PowerFAIDS-to-Banner integration that depended on custom Oracle jobs and stored procedures, replacing it with a SaaS-compatible Data Connect implementation for Ellucian Banner SaaS.
PowerFAIDS, a financial aid management system from College Board, helps financial aid offices manage and automate financial aid processes and exchange data with campus systems. Our customer, a university in the US, configured a data integration with PowerFAIDS. This integration ingested data from PowerFAIDS into the relevant tables of the on-premises Banner database. After modernizing their data environment to Ellucian Banner SaaS, our customer needed to re-implement this integration in a SaaS-compatible way. The main problem they faced was the need to replace outdated Oracle stored procedures and jobs with modern Data Connect pipelines and supported Banner SaaS APIs.
In this blog post, we describe how the ABCloudz team helped this university develop a highly customizable data flow that replaces the legacy data integration. These configurable Data Connect pipelines perform the necessary data transformation while ensuring the required level of security for sensitive financial data. Also, these pipelines run in two modes for audit and production data upload.
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Understanding project goals
The main goal of this integration project is to ensure the accurate and timely transfer of financial aid data to the Banner SaaS system. To do so, our team had to replace the existing custom jobs that updated student account charges, credits, and anticipated aid records.
The project covered two key PowerFAIDS data flows. The first flow processed disbursement authorization data and posted payments and credits to Banner Accounts Receivable. The second flow processed anticipated aid data and updated memo resources so students and university staff could see expected financial aid before final disbursement.
For testing and security purposes, our customer wanted to configure Data Connect pipelines to run in two modes.
- In the audit mode, these pipelines process the input from PowerFAIDS and store the output files with necessary changes on an Amazon S3 bucket. The customer can review these output files and validate that the financial aid data is processed correctly.
- In the production mode, these pipelines also process the input from the financial aid system. However, at the end of a production run, the pipelines send the processed data to the Banner SaaS API. In turn, the API updates the data in the system.
As the bigger picture emerges, the end goal of this data integration is to make the financial aid data available to students and university administration in the Ellucian Experience dashboard. Of course, features such as notifications about the updated records and automatic data processing when the source data changes are also nice to have. However, with the main goal of the project in mind, our team focused on the replacement of the legacy data integration that interacted with an on-premises Oracle database.
Current-state architecture
The following image shows the current state of the existing data integration architecture, which is a one-way data processing flow.
Our customer manually runs jobs to upload financial aid data from PowerFAIDS to their on-premises Oracle database. These jobs include common ETL (extract, transform, and load) steps.
First, our customer downloads the file from PowerFAIDS. Next, they run preprocessing Python scripts on the Financial Aid side to prepare the source data before the Banner jobs consume it. These scripts are part of the upstream process and were not the main modernization target for the ABCloudz team. The output of this preprocessing step is a comma-separated file with a specific name. At the next step, database stored procedures use this file to update student account records. These stored procedures perform additional data validation.
Our customer runs the disbursement process manually twice a week, while the anticipated aid process is run separately and consecutively after the disbursement flow.
Understanding the technical challenges
The main technical challenge of this project is to replace the stored procedures that directly update data in the on-premises Oracle database. In the Ellucian SaaS model, you can use Data Connect pipelines for ETL activities. Our team didn’t need to replace all Python scripts that perform data transformation. Actually, the customer wanted to keep those with minimal changes.
However, when it comes to validating data and updating the data records, Data Connect pipelines must orchestrate the process and interact with supported Banner SaaS APIs, loaders, or BP posting patterns through Ellucian Ethos. If a required field is not exposed in the tenant, the team can open a gap with Ellucian.
- For new financial aid posting records, the Data Connect pipeline inserts such information as a person identification number, transaction number, term code, detail code, amount, balance, and other relevant fields. Also, the integration ensures the proper management of sequence numbers for new financial aid posting records.
- For records tied to existing Banner persons, the integration must apply the correct record-matching logic for each data flow. For the disbursement flow, the process resolves the Banner person record by A-number. For the anticipated aid memo flow, the process uses SSN-based matching. Next, the integration validates the record details. Based on the validation result, the pipeline either logs the record as failed or moves it to the output file. Then, Data Connect submits the validated payload or loader input through the supported SaaS interface, with validation handled by the pipeline logic and the Banner SaaS API layer as appropriate.
Future-state architecture
The following image shows the future-state architecture of the new data integration, which is a SaaS-native replacement for the on-premises job.
The data integration completes the following steps.
- Retrieves configurable settings such as access credentials for the file storage, transformation rules, and the operation mode.
- Gets the source files from the S3 bucket, including CSV and fixed-width layouts as applicable.
- Applies the required validation and transformation to the files prepared by Financial Aid, while preserving the upstream preprocessing boundary unless specific transformation rules are moved into Data Connect.
- In the production mode, calls baseline loaders with Connect Serverless API or another supported Banner SaaS API option to insert or update financial aid posting records.
- In the audit mode, writes data to a CSV file and uploads this file to the S3 bucket for an audit.
- Updates the timestamp of the last processed file to ensure that each record is updated only once.
The data integration pipeline produces audit and reporting outputs for operational visibility. Also, from the updated Banner SaaS system, the Ellucian Experience dashboard receives the up-to-date information for students and administration.
This configurable integration receives the following parameters.
- Amazon S3 bucket with the source file
- Amazon S3 bucket for the audit file and log files
- Access credentials
- JSON file with transformation and mapping rules
- Mode of operation (update or audit)
The ABCloudz team ensured secure handling of sensitive data, such as access credentials. Also, the customer can easily configure transformation and mapping logic by using the settings file. Also, configuring the mode of operation was an important requirement. With this implementation, it is as easy as changing a configuration value.
Benefits and results
The ABCloudz team delivered a bespoke inbound data integration that automates the financial aid data updates in the Banner SaaS system. Our team used Ellucian Data Connect with Banner Accounts Receivable, as well as such SaaS-only technologies as Ethos, Experience, and Insight.
As a result, this integration covers the most popular use cases for our customer. Starting from an accurate and timely transfer of financial aid data from PowerFAIDS, and finishing with presenting up-to-date data in the Experience dashboard, this integration automates an important process of financial aid disbursement and anticipated aid visibility.
Our customer benefits by using the modern cloud-based Banner SaaS system. Also, they are excited about the streamlined migration of their data integrations to this new cloud-based system. With significant help from the ABCloudz team, our customer moved to the new platform. What is even more important is that they replaced the legacy integration pattern that depended on direct updates to the on-premises Banner Oracle database.
The students also benefit by receiving timely updates of their financial aid data. Now, they can focus on their studies rather than think of the financial aid.
Your trusted partner for data management
As an Ellucian Service Partner, ABCLoudz helps higher education institutions start using Ellucian Banner SaaS and take full advantage of this modern cloud environment. Do you want to reduce the maintenance costs for your on-premises Oracle databases and move the data to the cloud? Are you looking for help with modernizing your legacy data integrations? Read the following success stories of colleges and universities across the globe that trust our company to deliver the most complex data integration projects. Your story of successful data environment modernization might be the next in this list. To get started, contact ABCloudz today!
