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 – Mindtree relationship
Mindtree has a deep relationship with the business school since 2014, where we have been involved in multiple programs across the client’s student lifecycle and beyond. Some of the marquee programs delivered by Mindtree are:
- Building data-driven engagement with foundational CRM enabling 360 view of constituents
- Quality engineering of the online learning platform
- Enhancing core SIS platforms
- Cloud advisory and migration, design and implementation of cloud hosted data warehouse, service desk support and ITSM
Client’s Business Challenges
The client’s main objective was to create a business intelligence solution required to provide a holistic knowledge across the student lifecycle that includes - student registration, drop offs, student engagement, feedback, performance and course completion rates. In addition, the solution should also be capable of measuring campaign performances, extracting insights from user feedbacks and forecasting student registrations for future batches by using advanced analytics.
Engagement Overview
The data project started with the vision of creating unified storage for heterogeneous systems like payments, course content, student performance, feedback, marketing, and campaigning, etc. Mindtree compared multiple ETL mechanisms on various parameters like scalability, performance and cost before selecting the AWS-Redshift as the preferred EDW. At present, many reports related to student-360 are being generated. Now we are moving towards real time data streaming from the source systems so that multiple operational decisions can be taken faster.
Solution provided
Mindtree undertook the following steps to enable the client’s requirements:
- Collected, cleansed and transformed applicant data stored across applications like Salesforce, MongoDB, ServiceNow, Hubspot and Google Analytics
- Built a unified data warehouse on Amazon Redshift with data marts and a common query/reporting layer
- Created an Amazon S3 data lake layer for future analysis using Athena
- Integrated MongoDB with Redshift to enhance data and perform efficient analytics
- Transformed the semi-structured JSON data to relational tables in Redshift DB
- Transformed historical data from 650+ tables using 1400+ ETL Talend jobs
- Prepared data visualization and dashboards using Tableau
- Analyzed student feedback using natural language processing (NLP) in R and AWS Comprehend
- Used time series analysis using R, Redshift and Amazon forecast to predict student registrations
Technology landscape
Talend AWS – Redshift, S3, EC2 Tableau MongoDB Salesforce Python Shell Script
Client benefits
- The business school processes 4.0 million daily transactions for in-depth student insights on demographics, yield, completion rates, participant size, registration and course completion status
- Analyzing admissions data is helping the client’s marketing teams in planning focused social media marketing campaigns
- Created an Amazon S3 data lake layer for future analysis using Athena
- Developed an enrollment funnel report to analyze different aspects of the student lifecycle, i.e. from the start of the application process to course completion
- Performed sentiment analysis of student feedback which displayed sentiment scores and key phrases to analyze course performance.
- Reduced tool license cost by US $60K per year
