Elsmere Education is a certified B Corp that helps higher education institutions unlock enrollment growth and serve nontraditional and adult learners. Historically, they have leveraged a Salesforce implementation built on Sales Cloud paired with the Education Data Architecture. This presented significant limitations and challenges.
As a Salesforce partner, DEPT® helped Elsmere migrate its implementation to Education Cloud, an industry cloud that provides better alignment to core business processes and improves feature availability.
A multi-layered challenge
Elsmere’s previous system leveraged Sales Cloud and the Education Data Architecture (EDA), which lacked the functionalities and updates available within the recently released Education Cloud.
Elsmere partners with multiple institutions and each was implemented somewhat uniquely. This led to challenges in data consistency and the ability to update features and capabilities over time. In addition, the workflow to support students was fragmented, leading to difficulties in creating a clear articulation of student journeys through the system.
To solve this, we focused on data models and deployment modeling, which allowed us to migrate Elsmere’s partner institutions smoothly and efficiently, implementing improvements in the student journey, staff workflows, and third-party integrations. It also simplified analysis and reporting.
Beyond migration
We reimagined the existing Sales Cloud implementation + EDA within the data architecture and capabilities of Education Cloud. While some customizations were necessary to support Elsmere’s unique business operations, we achieved a consistent model that services current and future needs across all institutions and will scale to support additional institutions as the client base grows.
We partnered with Elsmere’s product team to evaluate existing student journey workflows, identifying how to best align them to capabilities and processes inherent to Education Cloud. Where there was not a good fit, we identified the required modifications to support the ecosystem. We were also able to move with noteworthy speed and efficiency; all Elsmere’s partner institutions were fully migrated to Education Cloud less than nine months after commencing the project discovery effort.
Education Cloud provided a much-improved baseline of functionality and data structures to allow a standard, scalable way to support Elsmere’s business processes and data needs. Plus, it allowed Elsmere’s staff to support students through their journey, with improved transparency along the way.
As an ongoing partner, we continue to implement updates and improvements, ensuring data flow within Elsmere’s unique implementation of Education Cloud and its curated ecosystem of vendor partners. Our development teams have also established a repeatable deployment process to facilitate new university onboarding and scaled deployment of updates, fixes, and new features.
Education Cloud powerhouse
By implementing the new Education Cloud platform and data model, Elsmere saw several areas improve:
Unified intake process: A new intake process ensures efficient duplicate evaluation and subsequent creation of new records as necessary throughout the system. This ensures clean record creation and reduces previous administrative burdens related to duplicate identification and management. It also provides a more flexible way to ingest third-party information, which provides opportunities for easily scaled expansion as Elsmere’s offerings evolve.
Standardized deployment package: A centralized deployment package means all partner institutions operate on the same version, enabling quick and efficient system updates across all institutions, as well as a common data model for more scaled insights and reporting.
Streamlined workflows: By refactoring the objects and records leveraged throughout the student support journey, Elsmere staff and client-side users have a more intuitive workflow, reducing data and workflow errors and improving throughput over time.
By leveraging the Salesforce Education Cloud platform, Elsmere has a data repository and streamlined workflows. It is now set up for scaled onboarding of new partner institutions and deployment of future features and capabilities.
By providing a solution with improved data structures (augmented with time-saving automation), we’ve helped Elsmere grow while ensuring high levels of service and data integrity.
About Elsmere Education
Elsmere Education is a certified B Corp that empowers higher education institutions to unlock sustainable enrollment growth and effectively serve nontraditional and adult learners. We enable universities with EPaaS, a tailored and transparent online student platform that helps build capacity until they are ready to go at it on their own. Leveraging our proven, scalable solutions, we partner with universities to research, launch, and market academic programs with unmatched expertise. We help our partners grow a better way.
