What we achieved together

The Client

This client is one of the world’s leading educational institutions, serving a diverse student body around the world and awarding post-graduate degrees with a specialization in master’s degrees, executive education, and online courses.

The Challenges

The institution had a 20-year-old finance system that had multiple integration points with business-critical applications. Due to its age, this system was no longer supported and presented significant challenges that required manual workarounds. For example, the Finance team had to create thousands of invoices and track student payments manually – a process that took half an hour per invoice, approximately 60 hours per week, and spanned two systems.

There was often confusion when a student needed to find out how much they still owed as this information was spread across four different sources of truth.

The client also wanted to give its students access to a self-service online portal where they could view and pay outstanding invoices to further reduce the burden on the finance team and enhance the student experience.

The Journey

The institution had recently embarked on a multi-year strategic digital transformation to enhance student and employee experiences, increase operational efficiency and resilience, gain greater control over its applications, reduce its dependency on a legacy database, and accelerate development time. The institution chose to migrate to Azure cloud to take advantage of cloud-cost optimization benefits.

The in-house development team was stretched thin, with everyone focused on maintaining business as usual and prioritizing other transformation projects. Ensono was selected as the strategic transformation partner to accelerate the pace of change. One of the early projects supported was the selection and integration of a new SaaS finance system.

During a six-week discovery phase, Ensono’s multidisciplinary team worked closely with the institution to review the challenges posed by the current system and the improvements that a modern system would deliver.

Ensono documented user personas and their current journeys and challenges, determined high-level systems architecture, and developed integration and business value maps. All known risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies related to a migration were documented. Ensono then recommended a shortlist of the three best-suited SaaS finance solutions.

Once the institution had selected its preferred solution, Ensono developed an integration between some of the existing Dynamics 365 applications used by the Admissions team and the new SaaS product to automatically create invoices and record payments. This approach eliminated the need to access the legacy database and provided a much simpler invoicing process.

Ensono acted on behalf of the institution to negotiate with the vendor on technical implementations. The invoicing process was automated by 96%.

Ensono delivered high-quality code, supported by robust quality assurance and documentation. Training was provided in the weeks leading up to the handover, and the in-house team was ensured they could easily understand and work with the new code base.

Technologies Used

• TechnologyOne as the new software vendor
• Dynamics 365 as the existing CRM system for admissions

The Outcomes Achieved

This project delivered substantial business value, including:

• A cloud-based finance system that’s easy to use, with 96% of the invoicing process automated. This frees up a significant amount of time and provides a significantly better employee experience.
• Students can now easily view their accounts and track invoice payments online.
• Connecting the invoicing process directly to the admissions process in CRM eliminated the need to connect to the old database that the institution is moving away from.
• High-quality code, handovers, and documentation mean that the institution’s team is able to confidently work in the new code base.
• The team was upskilled and gained exposure to new ways of working, including the software development lifecycle and automated testing.

“The Ensono team has been so easy to work with. Their transparency, strong governance, and problem-solving abilities paved the way to them becoming our strategic partner for digital transformation.”

“Ensono’s ability to understand complex issues, break them down for all to understand and provide solutions to most of them is impressive, as is their patience, attention to detail, and determination to ensure they get the information they need from other parties. Where we have met issues, they have been highly proactive in working with the vendor, our product owner, and infrastructure teams to remove the blockers. As a result, we are ahead of schedule.”

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