Case Study

Saving business critical systems and revenue streams

ROI on the project

  • 1.9x ROI on total investment
  • Huge reputational damage avoided
  • 60% reduction in manual processes

Our client is one of the worlds leading education institutes, founded over 140 years ago to promote the standard of technical education. Having worked with people, organisations and economies to help identify and develop the skills to thrive, build competency, to support better prospects of its learners.

The Challenge

Our educational client has embarked on a digital transformation of its learning platform, moving from a legacy system to a more robust, scalable and secure platform.

Application and data security is paramount of the service offering to their customers, due to the complexity and customisation over the years the current platform is several versions out of date across the technology stack, this in turn poses a commercial and operational risk to the business when CE+ regulatory certificate is due for renewal.

Our client needed an accelerated delivery programme to deliver a new platform to it’s end users and satisfy the requirements for the CE+ security regulatory board. The current legacy platform offered the complexity of multiple integrations into many other bespoke systems, the platform itself hosted and served content to end users, rigid in flexibility. One of the biggest drawbacks was the user experience – the mobile and browser compatibility was lacking, and the reporting was inadequate.

There are often times that manual processes are required due to lack of functionality or limitations within the platform that are unable to be enhanced.

The Solution:

Konvergent quickly established a project team and launched a discovery phase to identify possible vendors and products that would meet the requirements. It was quickly identified that separating the Learning Content Management System from the Learning Management System would offer the flexibility of how and where the content is served, whilst also enabling a central repository to consolidate other siloed learning platforms in the business.

A POC was established providing an eco-system integrating the building blocks of the solution using an LCMS SaaS product integrated into various SaaS LMS portals delivering content to the end users.

Throughout the POC and design phase, we provided dedicated project management support on all workstreams. This ensured overarching and integrated implementation approach.

The Results:

A coherent centralised Learning Content Management System and Learner platform that resulted in a greater user experience and fully future proof that met CE+ requirements. Utilising Cloud native technologies we were able to boost reporting capabilities to enable operational and sales targeted efficiencies across the learning verticals.

In addition, there was a 60% reduction in the manual processes the sales and support teams often had to rely upon. This has been estimated to save over £100k per annum.

ROI and Proving Value of Work

Why we need to demonstrate value:

In strategy and architecture, an often-neglected aspect is the Return on Investment (ROI). As financial professionals demand concrete figures when considering investments, more than a mere mention of process improvement or technology optimisation may be required. In their eyes, such endeavours represent costs, making it challenging to secure the necessary funding. Considering this, it is crucial to demonstrate ROI, regardless of how impressive a project’s visual outputs may be. How did Konvergent do this on this project? 

“Value is a number, everything else is noise” 

This work was absolutely critical to the client, as without the re-platforming exercise, a core revenue generating system would have had to have been completely turned off. This currently generates over £3.6 million per annum.

Including estimation of other vendor costs, client staff and Konvergent costs, the ROI delivered for this project collectively over a three year period was 1.9x. However, it would be near impossible to put a figure on the reputational damage that would have been caused if this critical system had been turned off.​

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