Delivery of Vital Student Management System

Business Need

Our client has as a legislative responsibility to maintain a register of students determined by the relevant legislation. Their existing system had reached its end of life and required significant upgrades to handle both changes in legislation and policy but also allow its users to undertake the work as required.

The solution needed to handle registrations of contracts from employers within industries important to the economy. Once the contracts were approved it then enabled specific employees to have access to a training wage and other employment and training opportunities that met criteria under a regulatory environment supporting skills acquisition.

The system needed to manage the progress of the 100,000 students registered for training opportunities.

The new solution was required to manage, store and report on all relevant data relating to students. There was also a requirement to integrate the system into numerous internal and external systems for the importing and exporting of data.

Approach

After a review of the client’s functional and non-functional requirements, HSD decided to implement a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 solution. This would allow the client to manage the students training contract (and associated data details) throughout their life cycle.

HSD also developed a business rules and validation rules creation and management engine. This helped the client to automate functions, whilst complying with legal obligations which in turn provided a cost saving benefit to the client.

To help manage the correspondence that was received from a wide range of sources, HSD also configured a SharePoint portal and document storage solution which provided a centralised location for all documents relating to each student.

To assist the client keep track on the performance of the program, HSD also delivered data reporting functionality. This allowed the client to create and run operational, management, statistical, audit, administration, ad-hoc and complex reports for internal and external stakeholders from data held in the system.

In addition, a web-based self-service portal which allowed external stakeholders to run their own reports.

The project also required the new solution to be migrated with a number of existing data sources and systems. These sources included (but weren’t limited to):

A national database on students.
A national register of training data.
Identity Management.
State based financial system.
Geocoding data.
National research firm.

Lastly the project required a large data migration process. This included the migration of data and database of the existing database into the new database structure. Which was completed through HSD’s extract, transform and load data migration process.

Technology Stack

Dynamics CRM 2015
SharePoint Document storage
SharePoint portal
HSD Connect integration service and job runner

Benefits

The system successfully went live and provided the client with a secure platform that allowed staff, stakeholders and end users with a platform that reflected the current policies and legislation. This in turn has reduced the disruption and frustration of the users and stakeholders. With a new and improved data model and validation, the client is also able to perform a greater level of analytical analysis on their program.

The system is now supporting the process which averages 40,000 new applications per year.

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