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The business school also observed faster application decisions, reductions in release deployment time, better compliance, enhanced student support, and streamlined task management
Client Overview
The client is a leading US-based Ivy League business school. It has consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world, and it offers full-time MBA, doctoral, and many other executive education programs. The school also has a publishing arm that publishes business books, leadership articles and case studies.
Client Business Challenges
The business school wanted a solution that could improve student recruitment and admissions by modernizing, rationalizing and streamlining the technology landscape which supported the business processes. Specifically, the business school wanted to:
- Create a student admissions portal which is scalable enough to support the applicants' load over time and can be extended to support future process needs
- Reduce application review and slash admission decision time
- Improve data exchange with partner schools to hasten decisions regarding scholarships and financial aids
- Reduce compliance risk by automating steps involved in student background check processes
- Increase efficiency in student support services through automation and better coordination between different functional teams
- Reduce apply-to-admit time and manage high volumes
- Increase system flexibility and configurability
- Support admissions for multiple courses that had different admission criteria
Solution Highlights
Mindtree built the admissions portal by leveraging Salesforce platform which had the following features:
- Built a moderately complex solution that included template driven architecture, custom community pages, complex UI design and validations for student facing pages
- Used out-of-the-box Salesforce capability to implement auto application review process
- Developed a highly-configurable and customizable workflow and task routing engine
- Automated the admission review process based on identified rules by using Salesforce’s native features
- Leveraged Salesforce Community Cloud for collaboration between applicants and the school administration
- Automated various task management processes with the help of cases
- Integrated with third-party tools to evaluate student essay scores
- Executed Agile delivery model with the ability to flex resources up/down in a timely manner
- Provided 24x7 application and infrastructure support that included priority issues, minor enhancements and performance tuning activities using an onsite/offshore global delivery model
- Provided preventive maintenance activities on a regular basis
- Provided email support through a shared service desk team
Technology Landscape
- JIRA to track minor enhancements and defects
- Confluence to manage requirements
- Selenium Framework to automate test scripts
- MWatchTM, a proprietary Mindtree tool, for infrastructure monitoring and management
Client Benefits
- Admissions Intelligence Engine speeds up application screening by incorporating automatic scoring of essays for 45-50% of applications
- Speeds up admission decision process for more than 85% of applications that began to be made available instantaneously, as opposed to 12 minutes per application previously
- Reduced admission decision cycle from weeks to days by re-engineering business process to improve efficiency and scaling
- Reduced deployment time by 85% by creating automated release deployments to avoid manual errors
- Streamlined task management for financial aid/scholarship and affiliations reviews
- Helped achieve 100% compliance with the business school’s defined security standards
