Success Stories
University of Cincinnati Experience-Based Learning and Career Education
University of Cincinnati Experience-based Learning and Career Education center CRM
Meet The Client
About UC's Experience-Based Learning and Career Education
The University of Cincinnati Experience-based Learning and Career Education (ELCE) serves as a fully-integrated career preparation hub within the University of Cincinnati. As the global birthplace of cooperative education, the division is a recognized leader in real-world education. Within a thriving culture of collaboration, the division provides students, employers and partners a single point of contact for experience-based learning opportunities and transition-to-career services. ELCE is the instructional home of the university's Cooperative Education Program, which for more than 100 years has provided students the opportunity to alternate full-time terms of school and work to give them a solid base of experience and professional development. In 2010, the Division launched the Academic Internship Program, which provides access to part-time internships to all UC students.
The Challenge
ELCE staff was struggling to track interactions and the level of engagement with organizations who were offering co-op positions and internships to UC students. UC uses a home-grown database system to contain the data for businesses, the positions they offer and the placement of students in the positions. The database system has no reporting capabilities, is not accessible remotely and does not allow staff to track their interactions with contacts at the organizations. The data was accessed by requesting reports from the IT department that were delivered in a spreadsheet whenever the IT department had time to process their request. The process was inconsistent and unpredictable.
ELCE had a tight budget and a need for a solution to be implemented in a timely fashion.
The Solution
Summit implemented a Sales Cloud CRM solution that enables ELCE staff to easily import data they receive in a flat file from the IT department into a relational CRM. Custom objects for positions and placements were created. Positions are related to accounts and placements are related to positions as child records. A process to upsert new records using the Apex Data Loader was designed and documented step-by-step. Data transformation steps were automated prior to upsert using MS Excel Power Query.
Custom sales processes and opportunity stages were set up to track the recruitment and onboarding of new businesses. Custom formulas were created to parse inbound data to pull out valuable information on position availability. Rollup fields summarize data at the Account level to provide quick insights into the quantity and nature of the positions offered by an organization. Charts added to the Account provide visualization of their engagement and the breakdown, by major, of the positions offered.
Reports and dashboards were created to track open positions by student major and location as well as the level of engagement of the companies in their system. Reports were also created to help identify companies that were no longer offering positions and companies with positions that were going unfilled.
Leads were configured with custom fields to track the majors the new positions might be offered from the companies they were engaging with.
ELCE staff were trained in using the new solution both from a desktop and a mobile device to look up information and record their activities. They were also trained on how to administer their new solution and create reports and dashboards.
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Results for Our Client
The University of Cincinnati ELCE now has a modern state-of-the-art system that allows them to quickly and easily find company, contact, position and placement data that had been buried in a legacy system they could not directly access. Since their staff are frequently on the road meeting new prospective companies, the ability to look up information and track their activities from their laptop or mobile device is extremely valuable.
Tracking events and communications with companies allows UC staff to identify companies that are more willing to engage with other activities such as open houses, career fairs, and guest speaking engagements. It also provides greater transparency, accountability and continuity within their department.
The streamlined data loading solution allows everyone on the ELCE team to benefit from frequent refreshes of the data. The reports and dashboards allow staff to identify organizations who are at-risk of leaving the program and re-engage, positions for students looking for certain criteria, new opportunities with organizations that are highly engaged with UC and areas of high demand with positions going unfilled.
The ability for ELCE staff to create their own reports and list views has empowered them to leverage their data in ways they had never dared dream of before. Not relying on an over-committed IT Department has improved morale - for both business and IT, efficiency and the timeliness of how to use the data they have been collecting for many years.
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