Education Modernization

Education Modernization

Modernizing a Management Information System for Schools and Colleges
A London-based school MIS (management information system) and student performance track-ing device provider wants to enhance their current functionalities. The company caters to schools and colleges, and as part of their solution capability improvement plan, they want to add and enhance modules including Administration, Student Registration, and Student Attendance. Furthermore, they want to make some enhancements in their core product framework to make it future-proof and extensible. The management also wants to offer these MIS modules as independent products in addition to as a suite of applications. To do that, they need a trusted technology partner who can bring a strong experience of product engineering and Microsoft expertise for the architectural changes that would be required.
The Vatsa Solution: Modernizing a Management Information System for schools and colleges

Vatsa Solutions did the initial due diligence and prepared a plan for making changes in the existing MIS modules. Vatsa defined the scope, priorities, and roadmap, and did end-to-end product rearchitecting and development. The transformation of the older system required understanding the business impact of the architectural changes and aligning the changes with industry practices and end-user behavior. As part of the solution, Vatsa brought strong technical expertise to build state-of-the-art soft-ware solution for the education industry. With strong product engineering and Microsoft exper-tise, Vatsa rearchitected the existing Assessment, Registration and Attendance modules. With the new and user-friendly interface, schools were able to analyze, track and follow their pupil’s performance closely. Also, Vatsa improved the registration and attendance modules and made
them much simpler and faster. The administration staff had real-time visibility into the morning and evening attendance registers. Further, based on this experience, Vatsa also built newer modules, including Reports, and Parent Portal. The Reporting module of the system was integrated into the MIS solution and pre-de-signed into each section of the system for more flexibility. Every report within the system could be scheduled to run automatically and be sent over email or were available at login.

The Parent Portal module provided parents with real-time visibility into their child’s perfor-mance and communication with the school.Vatsa also rearchitected the product’s core architectural framework that was initially designed by the client to make it extensible and future-proof. One of the key challenges was to under-stand the data structure complexity and user experience. Each small change in the data struc-ture of one module had a larger impact on the entire suite. Vatsa’s Solution Architects worked
diligently and made multiple careful modifications to the data structure and entity relation-ships without breaking the integrity of the system. A testing team drafted test cases that sup-ported these changes and ensured full coverage of code and workflows across its multiple components. The planned activity ended with the delivery of a fully operational and optimized system without issues.

Results:
The complex and delicate nature of the implementation was supported by the technologi-cal expertise and commitment from Vatsa’s team, and the company has become a trusted partner for the customer. The engagement has lasted a long time, and Vatsa continues to develop and improve the various MIS modules and make enhancements. This has resulted in a lot of benefit for the client, including:
  • Intuitive, user-friendly interface to ana-lyze and track pupil’s performance
  • Improved flexibility to the customer with a full suite of MIS modules that can also be offered independently to schools and colleges
  • A modern, cutting-edge system that can quickly accommodate current and future customer requirements
  • The client’s management could focus on continuous improvement of the product based on customer feedback, which has led to a large and happy customer base for the company
Technology and Tools:
Microsoft .Net, C#, SQL 2008 R2, MVC architecture

Learn how you can achieve similar results for your business. 

Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Modernization of critical SharePoint based enterprise software platform for improved employee productivity and collaboration

A large candy manufacturer from the United States relies on SharePoint for its employee collaboration initiatives. The purpose of this portal is to inform, train and educate employees. Being a business that creates high volume, creative products for children, the company relies heavily on new ideas and innovation fostered from within its employee and partner base to consistently bring new products to the market and stay a step ahead of competition. The SharePoint-based intranet portal was called New Product Initiative, or NPI. NPI allowed the employees to put up ideas for new products, which then went through various feasibility studies and approval cycles that involved other corporate teams including product, manufacturing, marketing and finance. While the company had a process for this communication, the adoption of the current portal by employees fell short of company’s expectations due to rigid legacy architecture and lack of streamlined process and automation. Lack of optimum integration points, performance issues and a subpar user experience caused inefficient usage and hurdles in collaboration between teams.

The Vatsa Solution: Improving performance and user experience of SharePoint based system
The company’s management wanted to modernize this business-critical application and approached Vatsa to perform a due diligence. The due diligence process surfaced key insights and bottlenecks related to the usability of the portal and workflows. It was decided that using the Microsoft environment was the most optimum because it utilized the existing infrastructure, had a great price-to-performance ratio and provided a robust roadmap with strong integrations for future enhancements. Vatsa used SharePoint designer and improved the overall portal experience by creating a new look and feel. As an important step and to address the key insights that had surfaced, Vatsa also redesigned the site navigation and user experience to introduce layers of activity that aligned with organizational goals and the innovation process, and created workflows for data collection and information validation that drove the product ideation process. These workflows provided review points and designated approval hierarchies as forms and other documents that traced an idea seamlessly from the beginning to its logical conclusion. Superior user experience, and seamless workflows with appropriate roles, alerts and reminders were the key highlights of the transformational improvements that Vatsa brought to the engagement.
Results:

The company has been in manufacturing business for nearly 100 years. With increasing pace of business and rising competition, introducing new product ideas continuously was identified as a critical differentiator for the company. Vatsa brought its full-stack expertise on Microsoft technologies to transform the existing portals and business processes with superior performance and user experience. This resulted in:

1) Vastly improved ideation process powered by automated workflows and seamless interworking of all SharePoint and NPI components
2) An order of magnitude improvement in employee adoption and usage of the new NPI system, with it becoming the primary source of communication for the entire innovation process
3) Adoption of NPI by the core product team for its own internal usage and innovation in addition to new ideas coming from employees at large, resulting in dramatically increased productivity of staff across the board
4) A robust system that is a durable competitive differentiator and core competency that is hard to replicate for others in the industry

Technology and Tools:

SharePoint Designer, SharePoint InfoPath Designer

Learn how you can achieve similar results for your business.