Industry Training Authority

Background

The Province of British Columbia had mandated the Industry Training Authority (ITA) to increase trades training participation and completion, for the influx of required skilled trade people to adhere to in the coming years. This was mainly due to rapid development across the province. As the ITA is responsible for facilitating all communications with apprentices, sponsors, training providers and schools as well as tracking hours, registrations, exam results, and other key data against those contacts, it was deemed necessary to implement a design and implement data-driven enterprise digital platform for managing all business processes for navigating apprentice’s journey and carrying out mandate of managing growth of Province’s workforce in accordance with market needs.

Project Goal

The major project goals were to:

• The resulting application is customer focused, while enabling a collaborative view between ITA, Sponsors, Apprentices, and Training providers.
• Develop tools to facilitate communications between the ITA and applicants and permit holders
• Provide an avenue for fair and consistent responses to permit non-compliance

Alianz Role

Alianz was awarded 5 years exclusive contract for design, build and support enterprise digital platform for Industry Training Authority BC.

Challenges

We faced the following major challenges:

• Defining enterprise architecture that supports ITA’s mission in long term
• Change management. Developing transition architecture and executing change management plans were challenging and rewarding.
• Legacy System Support. Overall rolling releases kept pieces of functionality managed in legacy Oracle system as functionality was merged overtime into the new system, resulting in service clerks managing information in 2 systems temporarily.
• Gaining support from business stakeholders for focusing on adoption of the solution that has been built in iterative way
• Ensuring no downtime for business departments during monthly releases of the solution.
• Working with multiple departments reconciling priorities and principle business requirements for digital platform
• Improving project management procedures and collaboration between business and IT departments
• Ensuring solution’s compatibility for cloud deployment while working with on-prem versions of Dynamics 365

Major outcomes

• Digital platform with a 360-degree, interconnected view and current data for all ITA customers (training providers, sponsors, trade programs, individual certifications, apprentices, youth students, etc.) across all 8 ITA business departments.
• Re-engineered and optimized business processes for handling customer support for apprentice, sponsor, and training providers.
• Tailored Dynamics 365 CRM business application suite with customer service, case management, marketing, event management, integrated online payment solution, service request, managing program standards, ensuring SLAs and supporting customer journeys modules
• Call center telephony system fully integrated with Dynamics 3865 CRM
• A complex integrated case management solution that spans across multiple divisions
• A document management component that is integrated with the Dynamics CRM
• Automated business workflow and complex business rules management system
• Real time bi-directional D365 CRM integration with multiple third-party legacy systems
• Enterprise reporting and analytical solutions built on Microsoft Data Platform
• Security controls for ensuring compliance to FOIPPA legislation, PIA policies and OCIO security recommendations.

All business workflows have been automated, enabling timely and accurate communication between department, customers and third parties. As result:

• All ITA departments are 100% compliant to their appropriate Service Level Agreements
• 14% productivity increase of customer services department
• 6% decrease of time, required for scheduling certification exams
• 17% productivity increase of assessment department
• 21% productivity increase of completion department

Automated, tailored marketing campaigns led to increase of youth enrolment in trades programs across all segments.

Timelines and Methodology

Alianz delivered all phases of the project leveraging proven hybrid software implementation methodology, with development of specifications, coding, and testing done in 2-weeks long iteration sprints with monthly feature or support releases.

At all phases of the project, Alianz was in close contact with business stakeholders and presented weekly demonstrations of solution functionality to refine platform feature set, user experience and functionalities.

Project started in Q1 2015 . It has been delivered in several phases. Each phase had statement of work with specific scope, timelines, and budget.

Training

Alianz has trained system administrators as well as end-users over the course of the project lifecycle.

Support Contract

On going

Environment and Technology

Dynamics 365 CRM

Microsoft SharePoint technologies

Microsoft Data Platform (Power BI, EDW, SQL Server)