Global education provider Study Group is using the Boomi Platform to unite its digital ecosystem and provide a streamlined experience to more than 61,000 students throughout the entire learning lifecycle. Study Group wins with Boomi by building a modern IT foundation that accelerates student outcomes from initial application all the way through to alumni status.
Like many educational institutions, Study Group faces the challenge of processing, managing and maintaining a high volume of student information. In 2018 alone, Study Group’s recruitment teams enrolled more than 30,000 students from 142 countries within a variety of learning programs across a multitude of locations.
Another issue common to education providers is legacy systems. Study Group had a series of complex, on-premise legacy integrations that simply were not able to manage the growing volume of student information generated. This resulted in outdated and inaccurate data and time-consuming issue resolution.
“In the past, our on-premise integrations risked data getting out of sync or taking a long time to update across the board – and due to the complexity of the approach, it was difficult to identify and amend an issue when it occurred,” says Marty Grant, the organization’s global head of delivery and architecture.
And as 80 percent of Study Group’s business comes from its recruiting partnerships, according to Grant, accuracy and real-time visibility are crucial to the business. To the partners who place their trust in Study Group, this transparency was essential.
Boosting Trust Through Visibility
Study Group turned to Boomi for scalable data and application integration. Using Boomi’s intuitive drag-and-drop integration mapping interface, the global education provider was able to quickly and easily connect its core systems, including a student management system, Salesforce and more.
For education providers, connectivity goes hand-in-hand with a need for data quality management. Implementing effective institutional data governance practices and organizational structures is an ongoing challenge — one of the top 10 challenges faced by higher education organizations, according to EDUCAUSE.
Data quality is key to delivering control. Boomi Master Data Hub allows Study Group to ensure master data is up-to-date and uncompromised across all systems — through the same easy to use platform. Now the organization can quickly consolidate master data from all of its systems and enforce quality standards.
This level of availability and visibility has encouraged employees and agents to engage with Study Group’s software and services more frequently, says Grant.
“We are now at a point where we have full visibility over data, which has made employees more productive and further boosted trust in our systems from the agents with whom we partner,” Grant explains.
Moving Closer to the Cloud
The cloud-native Boomi Platform’s ability to connect any combination of cloud, on-premise or hybrid IT applications also provides a pathway for Study Group’s planned IT modernization initiative. Now, the organization is actively looking at adopting more best-of-breed cloud applications. Enabled by Boomi’s unparalleled connectivity options, it expects the majority of its core systems to be cloud-based within the next five years.
With Boomi solutions for higher education, all types of education providers are improving student experiences, increasing speed and agility, and gaining new administrative efficiencies.