General Banner Information
Banner is an administrative Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software system developed specifically for higher education institutions hosted by our cloud provider Ellucian. Banner maintains student, alumni, financial and personnel data. Banner also integrates with many 3rd party systems used by multiple departments, click here for a complete overview.
Banner consists of six integrated modules:
The systems are highly integrated because they all share a common database. This common database is shared by everyone who uses Banner at ECSU, which makes it easy to maintain records on someone who applies to the University, becomes a student, graduates, and then becomes an alumnus. Technically, data is not actually stored in Banner. Data is stored in a powerful database called ORACLE. It would be difficult for a non-technical user to directly add or retrieve data from the actual database. The Banner software acts as an interface to the ORACLE database, making the job of adding or retrieving data much easier. Banner provides the features and processing capabilities needed for student information (admissions, registration, etc.), alumni information (sponsor identification, campaign management, etc.), human resources information (employee benefits, salary/deduction history, etc.), financial aid information (needs analysis, packaging, etc.) and finance information (general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc.).
Because of the common database, multiple departments use the information entered into Banner. Other departments share data, sometimes several years in the future. For example, a name change would be reflected in the Student, Financial Aid, Human Resource, and Alumni systems. Though information on Banner is shared, many users are allowed only to look up (query) specific information. When you perform a query, you retrieve information from the database and display that information on the screen. Banner has a variety of tools that let you search by name and automatically retrieve associated information. Banner also has sophisticated security measures to make sure that only authorized individuals have access to specific data.