Case Study: Implementations for university

Many years ago, we implemented a CRM system for a university. If you think about it, every student is really a customer at the organization level. So, for this particular university, they were Microsoft partners, and they had a Dynamics CRM implementation on their end, so we basically did a homegrown implementation of AX. We created a learning management system module,a CRM module, and sort of a blackboard module as well, where they could get reporting.

So all of those services were connected in order to make sure the students were able to access their information, such as grades, subjects, finance information (like coursework), communications, and basically everything within the same system.

Many stakeholders were interested in the success of that project, from a marketing standpoint, to create a very strong alumni network, from the accounting side to make sure that they were up to date with their payments, from their academic standpoint to make sure that there were alerts and triggers set up in there when there was work that was not completed on a timely manner, basically from all the aspects of the organization there were stakeholders, because it touched so many areas, and was set up in a way that did a lot of remediation work, to make sure we got it to a point where it was a fully functional solution.

There were around five product managers, three solutions architects for each of the component areas (ECM, CRM, marketing, accounting), and then finally, for the technology side, since they were planning to host everything within their data center.

Then a layer project morphed into a complete cloud offering. This happened around the time when Microsoft switched their licensing options, so we went for a hybrid setup where there were only certain components that would be accessible from the data center, but the majority of the offering was created in the cloud.

There was a lot of change that took place so we decided to roll out the project. This was a two year duration project, where we had to roll things out in phases in a way that didn’t affect the overall project structure and that it provided a scalable platform for growth. We worked with an offshore team to develop the solution and that school, as of today, is still working with the system we created for them.