STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY

The challenge

For years, individual units across Stony Brook made the case that they were underfunded relative to peers, pointing to national benchmarks to back up their argument, but without a credible, apples-to-apples way to compare spending across institutions, those comparisons rarely carried enough weight to change minds in the budget office. Finance leadership faced the same gap from the other direction: internal trend analysis could describe Stony Brook's own operations, but it couldn't say where the institution was underinvesting, or spending more than it should for what it was getting, relative to peers — and that comparison was the missing piece.

Braden Hosch, Vice President for Educational and Institutional Effectiveness, had watched the search for that missing piece for years, first as an observer and then as a champion of the product known as HelioCampus Labor Cost Analytics.

The solution: Bringing independent, comparable data to the table

HelioCampus Labor Cost Analytics gave Stony Brook a range of normalization factors — spending or staffing per student, per research dollar, per square foot cleaned, and more — so comparisons account for an institution's size and mission rather than raw totals alone. For a large, research-intensive university, that distinction mattered.

"We're smaller than a number of the other public AAU institutions, so it's not just that we're always at the bottom. We get to see where we are on a per-student or per-faculty basis," says Hosch.

A localized view

Beyond leadership presentations and consulting, Stony Brook also adopted DataFlex to deliver unit-level records and summary benchmarks on a daily or weekly basis directly into the institution's own Tableau environment. That gave Stony Brook's team the ability to trend the data, build reports by unit, and localize it to the way each part of campus actually describes its own work.

Hosch shares, "In the HelioCampus standard activity model, advising and student services are described across the whole campus. But some units say, I'm the advising unit - we need to localize and look at the spend that way. Being able to look at it the way our staff and faculty look at the world is really, really valuable."

Building a culture where the data is trusted

Good labor cost benchmarking data does little if no one believes it. Stony Brook built a data governance structure with clear stewardship responsibilities and data dictionaries, and — for labor cost data specifically — a cross-functional process where finance, budget planning, and financial analysis teams work directly with units to map position descriptions to the standard activity model themselves.