Online University Data Engineering and Business Intelligence

Our client (University) is a fully-accredited online graduate university with a mission to improve professional development for K-12 art teachers around the world.  

Challenge

In the last few years, University has implemented an aggressive growth plan that included launching an online masters degree, expanding its enterprise sales team, and launching a new curriculum product targeted at enterprise customers.

University’s systems were developed to support its existing business lines: online conference, magazine, individual courses, and professional development platform, not the planned online university or enterprise sales organization. University needed internal systems that could support new product lines and business processes without rebuilding internal systems that successfully supported existing product lines.

University’s increasing complexity and rapid growth prevented senior leadership from having clear visibility into each department and presented barriers to delegating quality decision-making to department heads.

Investments in internal infrastructure needed to be structured to allow University to understand the scale of growth that could be expected from new product launches.

Solution

The CorrDyn Team:

• Engineered a data pipeline that integrated University’s data from across its front end website, CRM, learning management system, payment processor, accounting system, and media management platform into a data warehouse.
• Developed an automated business intelligence suite in Tableau that provides visibility to senior leadership and reduces the administrative burden of monitoring the company’s existing business lines.
• Integrated the data warehouse with University’s Hubspot CRM to provide valuable information to the company’s sales and marketing teams, enabling analytical support and strong decision-making at every level of the organization
• Built automated product line revenue and enrollment forecasts to provide visibility into staffing and budget needs
• Automated business processes related to scholarship funding, course rosters, invoices, and revenue reconciliation that would cost hundreds of hours of employee time per month as the company continues to scale
• Created a NoSQL data store to capture events from University’s website, enabling better understanding of customer activity.

Results

University staff were freed from time-consuming manual data manipulation, allowing them to focus on strategic business initiatives, including product launches and enhanced sales and marketing.  In the year following initial implementation, University experienced accelerated 87% annual revenue growth without a corresponding cost or staff growth.

Implementation of the data warehouse immediately removed the need for an expensive Student Information System implementation. It also enabled the sales, marketing, and academic advising teams to have access to all necessary customer data to become more efficient.

Overall, the school’s eighteen department heads have a consistent view of the business and a platform from which to make and validate data-driven decisions. University’s forecasts have become more accurate while requiring significantly less time to prepare. Overall, the school has seen its technology capacity expand dramatically, even as its technology overhead has remained stable.

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