Contact
Mr. Fred Miller
Director of Information Technology
Illinois Wesleyan University
P.O. Box 2900 Holmes Hall
Bloomington, IL 61701
309/556-3823
fmiller@titan.iwu.edu

Project Scope			Institution
			Small	Medium	Large
		Public	-	-	-
		Private	-	X	-
		Multicampus		no

Brief Project Description
Like many institutions today, Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) faced the various problems associated with aging infrastructure, demands for new facilities for students and academics, a more educated and demanding student population, and changing concepts of what constitutes "education." All of this placed increasing demands on IWU funding sources in order to keep pace with the changing educational market.

At a time that requires accelerated investments in telecommunications technology, this competition, obsolescence, and rate decline combined to make it more difficult for IWU to realize the surplus from long distance and other telephone services that had traditionally been used to support technology acquisitions. IWU students were constantly bombarded with claims of very low long distance rates from a variety of carriers. University rates were not seen as being competitive, and students found other methods of making telephone calls and/or became very vocal about the University taking undue advantage of them. All of this resulted in a decrease in the number of students using University services and in the profit margin from those who did.

It was in this context that Illinois Wesleyan University retained Compass Consulting International, Inc. to review its telecommunications resale operations and to recommend improvements.

Compass performed an in-depth operational and financial analysis and was able to recommend changes that improved call handling and eliminated call blockage. In addition, Compass designed a program that reduced administrative long distance rates and used the administrative savings to reduce student rates. Students moved from high, distance-sensitive rates to a postalized rate that compared favorably with the best commercially available residential programs (*especially as the IWU program has no monthly fee). Additional revenues allowed IWU to acquire a new billing system to better handle in-house resale and automate many of the present manual functions. In total the program improved all aspects of long distance service and still produced revenues $50,000 a year greater than under the original program.

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