Board of Advisors Meeting Minutes: Nov. 29, 2019

April 21, 2021
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Attendance

Advisors Present

  • Helena Keirstead, chair
  • Jennifer Komar, vice-chair
  • Michael Lisetto-Smith
  • David Wheatley
  • Madhu Kalimpali
  • Martin Chi
  • Donna Braund
  • Melanie More-Duckworth
  • Kara McDowell
  • Lisa Levitan
  • Matthew Rohweder

Prism Resources Employees Present

  • Seth Armas, president
  • Julio Mendoza, VP member relations
  • Alex Ojo, VP training services
  • Sam Chai, VP human resources
  • Mimi Ngo, VP marketing
  • Katya Kisselev, marketing coordinator
  • Harry Wang, marketing coordinator
  • Amir Ghaemian, data analyst
  • Jessica Duncan, desk manager
  • Thomax Dixon, trainer

Agenda

Approval of Sept. 27 Meeting Minutes

The meeting began at 12 p.m. with the approval of the Sept. 27, 2019 meeting minutes. It was agreed to go ahead and post the minutes after second, more high level version is created..

Financial Updates

The budget that was presented was dated to Oct. 31, 2019. Revenue decreased by $24,292 from the same point last year, and this was mainly due to the increase in opt-outs due to the student's choice initiative. Expenses decreased by $48,242 due largely to the decrease in IT and Administrative support. Other savings came from the transition to the Microsoft suite for all of Prism's file administration and messaging needs as these services do not cost Prism anything due to the school’s agreement with Microsoft. In order to continue reducing costs, Prism will be looking into reducing the number of Bloomberg terminals. Potential new costs could come from purchasing Adobe, SAP and Nielsen licenses.

Prism Fee Discussion

Prism’s marginal revenue is based on an average student base of 9272 annual members. Prism’s executive team was divided on if the fee should be raised and what it would be raised to. The Prism fee is being reevaluated for two reasons. The first is that the Prism fee has not been adjusted for inflation since it was created. The second reason for raising the fee is to enhance Prism’s services. Potential uses of this revenue would be to fund a new ERP, purchase CapIQ and develop courses for it, add Adobe courses and software, and add other training software and courses. The exact breakdown of the cost has yet to be determined. No conclusive decision was made and it was decided that further research is needed before decision is made whether or not the fee should be raised. As of now the budget has been balanced.

Training Services Updates

  • Staff and Faculty Training
    The first thing that was discussed from the training department was the staff and faculty training initiative to provide Excel training to Laurier staff. Prism expects this initiative to be a positive contributor to revenues.
  • Training Employee Structure
    An idea of splitting the role of the training manager into two training managers that each focus on a specific discipline within the department was presented. The plan is to have one finance manager for the Bloomberg and accounting courses and one software manager that focuses on the maintenance of the software's in the lab as well as managing the other courses. This division of responsibilities allows the Vice President of Training to focus on innovating the department.
  • Salesforce Update
    This semester was Prism’s first for providing a Salesforce module. The development of the module was created in Spring 2019 and then further refined this semester. It was discussed that additional outreach to the marketing clubs of Lazaridis Students’ Society and marketing faculty could aid in boosting awareness and attendance.
  • Adobe Return
    Prism is looking into adding Adobe as part of our training course offerings. These courses would only be taught a few times a semester by the marketing coordinator. This discussion followed response from students and Prism employees that Prism should start offering Adobe courses.
  • Data Science Portfolio
    The coding department oversees Stata, and R. The focus of the coding department was on programming languages; however, most business students do not find these courses beneficial as they are too technical to teach in a few modules. Prism’s new focus will be on data analytics and visualization.
  • Tableau Course
    Prism is looking to add a Tableau course to its line of data visualization courses. The only costs of adding the Tableau course would be the development cost of the training modules as the software is free for download by the students.
  • Financial Software Research Project – Feedback
    Prism is currently spending $140,000 on 16 Bloomberg terminals. Prism is proposing the idea of buying a site license for CapIQ, which is a software used in the Investment Banking and Equity Research industries. Most students get their finance jobs in those industries, so CapIQ would benefit them greatly. Many students find the opportunity of getting to use a Bloomberg terminal beneficial for landing their jobs, so Prism does not want to eliminate those terminals. Instead, we will be reducing the Bloomberg terminals and adding CapIQ on the computers in LH1015. Sam, the Training Manager has contacted LIFA, Madhu, and Gerry Ramos for their inputs and they are all supportive of the idea.

Data Analytics Role and Projects

There were no significant changes to the End of Term Survey Report. Amir, the Data Analyst analyzed the opt-in and opt-out reports and discovered that zero automatically opt-ed in students who opted out using the student choice initiative, opted back in at the desk during the semester. Moving onto the breakdown of opt-ins of non-automatically opt-ed in students,, this semester there was a significant increase in Master and PhD student opt ins. Data Analyst will now be undertaking projects to bring more marketing and training analytics.

Stata Discount

The idea of the Stata discount is to offer 6-month licenses of Stata 16 SE at a discount of $45 to our members. We would purchase 50 licenses from Stata and sell it to our students at cost. The students this would benefit would be the Master of Arts in Business Economics and students taking EC395 and EC495. Michael suggested that we gain more student feedback from the Economics club. Helena suggested that we get insight from 1st and 2nd year Economics students. Martin also suggested that we investigate what would happen if Stata 17 came out.