I mentioned to a few people at the recent AAIR Load Management SIG that I believed there were some leading indicators that might be useful in gauging demand and therefore load way ahead of the actual enrolment process.  I’ve had this hunch for a long time but hadn’t quite managed to find the time to see if it was true.

Well, yesterday I did a little bit of digging and I think the results are quite interesting, almost exciting even.  Just to back up a little, the issue we have is being able to understand the main variable of load forecasting - the commencing student intake (we can get the continuing numbers through the use of retention statistics).

Right now we’re concerned with the main 2010 first semester intake, the census date for which is way off into the future (March 31st next year).  At that point we will know what our commencing load and income will be.  Until then it is all down to the black art of load forecasting - or is it?

If we look at admission applications and compare the numbers with the eventual enrolments we find a pretty good correlation.  Here is how things ended up for us last year in terms of commencing students, each dot represents a course.  This data however shows all admissions for last year and all eventual enrolments.  I need to do an ‘on this day last year’ comparison to see if this is truly a leading indicator this far ahead of time, but either way it gives us a high confidence level at least a month or so ahead of census date.

But here’s where it gets really interesting.  What if we look at leading indicators of admission activity?  We’re talking about demand generation here, the interest in a subject that ultimately becomes translated into an enrolment if we achieve conversion in Marketing speak.

So what might it look like if we took the number of course searches carried out ahead of the up-coming admission and enrolment period?  Might this show some relation to the eventual enrolment?  Well I think it does.

The above chart shows the number of course searches in the month of September 2008 compared to the subsequent final enroloment in that same course at March 31st 2009, that is over 7 months into the future.

At this stage the figures are pretty rough and the process is quite manual but it only took a couple of hours yesterday to do this and I think the chart speaks for itself.

The other great thing about course and indeed unit searches is that they are high in volume.  We’ve been capturing this data since September 2007 and have over 9.2 million individual searches.

So the next step in our quest for automated and dynamic load forecasting is to somehow use these leading indicators to bring perhaps just a little systems input to bear on the mysterious black art.  Hopefully, (much) more (very) soon…

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