The SC Johnson College of Business faced a challenge familiar to many evolving organizations: processes that worked well in smaller, independent schools no longer scaled easily after the transition to a combined organization. Informal coordination, hallway conversations, and institutional memory previously facilitated faculty assignments, committee work, and academic planning across groups of 60 to 100 faculty members. But in a college of more than 250 faculty, the multitude of decisions required across departments, programs, and semesters became unwieldy.

The challenge was not simply about managing more data. It was about preserving the strong relationships and collaborative cultures that defined the community while creating systems that could support more complex planning needs. Faculty assignments had to be accurate, workloads equitable, and decisions visible across multiple stakeholders operating on overlapping academic timelines.

In 2017, the college began addressing process and data challenges with a variety of tools, and while Salesforce is not the only tool they used, it’s the most flexible, and therefore often the most appropriate for the challenge at hand. Over time, they developed an ecosystem. It evolved organically and currently ranges from complex to textbook-simple solutions.

The Academic Planning Database was initially developed to solve an immediate operational need: creating a centralized tool for coordinating class assignments and a reliable source of academic planning data. As teams became more familiar with Salesforce and recognized opportunities to address other long-standing challenges, additional tools and databases followed. New applications were created incrementally, each designed to solve a specific problem while supporting the people and processes behind the work.

Today, several Salesforce databases support a variety of academic processes to keep data accurate, aligned, and ready when decision-makers need it.

Tools for Balancing Faculty Time Commitments

From committee work to teaching loads, SC Johnson faculty members spread their time across a wide range of responsibilities. To track both current and future commitments, the team designed a set of Salesforce tools that bring structure and visibility to this complexity.

The Academic Planning Database serves as the central system of record, powering tools like the Connect 360 Teaching Dashboard, which gives school and college leaders insight into teaching capacity, load, and distribution. Another tool, the Faculty Titles Database, utilizes a simple but flexible structure for easily tracking roles and upcoming expirations. This allows leadership to plan ahead for reappointments and transitions, avoiding last-minute decisions.

Committee Work

While vendor tools power many solutions for understanding faculty activities across the college, Salesforce provides an easily adaptable platform for “home growing” solutions where no other tools exist. For example, before creating a list of potential candidates to fill a new committee role, the college administrative teams turn to Salesforce reports to review existing committee assignments, upcoming vacancies, and overall participation.

Their Salesforce solution, used for several years, provides a near-real-time view of committee activity—something that was previously captured only once a year in incomplete snapshots. This has become especially critical as faculty cross school lines to help on committees across the college because school deans’ offices no longer have the entire cross-college picture. Committees are tracked as accounts, with faculty membership maintained through affiliation records that can be updated continuously.

This shift reduces reliance on memory or informal tracking through spreadsheets or Word documents. Instead, the team uses Salesforce data to highlight faculty who may already be carrying a heavy service load and identify others who are available to contribute. By making this work visible, the system supports a more equitable distribution of committee assignments across the college.

Course Assignments

To balance teaching loads across programs and semesters, the team relies on the Academic Planning Database to track course offerings, faculty assignments, and teaching commitments in one place.

The academic planning cycle is continuous. Each May and June, the upcoming academic year is finalized and rolled forward to create the planning year. From late summer through fall, stakeholders across departments submit updates: first for course offerings, and then for faculty assignments and teaching loads. By November, the data is consolidated for review, and in December a working draft of the schedule is ready for registrars to begin building upcoming semesters.

One of the most complex challenges is that the team manages two realities at once: maintaining the active academic year while simultaneously building the next. Changes are happening in both environments at the same time, requiring constant coordination across departments and roles.

The Academic Planning Database plays a critical role in keeping this process aligned. By centralizing data and supporting detailed reporting, it allows the team to validate updates, track changes, and ensure that decisions about teaching assignments reflect the most current information available. This reduces the risk of conflicting data and helps leadership make informed decisions about faculty workloads and program needs.

Bringing Data and People Together

Across academic planning, committee coordination, and faculty workload management, the goal is not just to build better systems, but to build better processes that people trust and use.

The Salesforce tools supporting the SC Johnson College of Business bring clarity to complex, fast-moving decisions by creating a shared, reliable picture of academic activity. But just as important is how that data is maintained and applied. Behind every report and dashboard is a team working continuously to validate information, coordinate across stakeholders, and ensure that the data reflects real-world needs and constraints.

The result is a model that balances structure with flexibility. Leadership gains the insight needed to plan effectively. Departments have the coordination they need to stay aligned. And faculty are freed from the burden of constant data requests and administrative follow-up, allowing them to focus on teaching, research, and service.

In an environment where so much depends on timing, accuracy, and collaboration, that balance between data and people is what makes the difference.