The center is a non-profit foundation and a unique binational center in Bogotá recognized by the United States Embassy in Colombia.
It belongs to the Network of American American Centers, which brings together nine cultural and educational institutions created to contribute to good relations between Colombia and the United States.
Project timeline
1. Identified expectations for this project.
At this stage, our company scheduled meetings with the client in order to understand their needs in accordance with the improvements required to be achieved.
2. Discovery process.
Client initial Goals: as an initial goal the center's team was thinking about a new website. At that time there was a very old one that was just not close to the needs of the center. they were also thinking about an online payment option to improve customer service and reduce waiting times and queues
The Discovery: as per the time transcurred at this point, the initial meetings revealed a much more intricate process and a lot of individual tasks manually addresses and as critically as it sounds, those tasks were depending merelly on people as individuals, with almost no control.
Interviews with users - part one: At this stage, it was necessary to undertake interviews with all the stakeholders, particularly with leaders to understand the complexity of their processes; the information was processed and taken to the IA documentation.
Interviews with users - part two: Now was the time to the processes related employees we undertake interviews with all the stakeholders, particularly with the payment and inscription; the obtained information was also processed and taken to the IA documentation.
The Real needs. The results of the interviews and their analysis revealed the need to approach the project not only from the digital but also as a process of integral improvement of the procedures throughout the organization.
Processes such as generation of schedules, allocation of rooms and teachers, scheduling of events and with them all its variables could be improved from a redefinition accompanied by a digitized, automated and personalized academic system.
An improvement was also needed in the allocation of quotas, decentralized payments, discount plans, agreements, inscriptions and special programs.
This would have a direct impact not only on the results and the investment, but on the daily tasks of almost every member of the organization, the locative, academic and cultural coordinations would not be the same again.
3. Information Architecture: Functional and content features of the website and the new academic system evolved towards the documentation needed to undertake development, taking into account that each headquarters around the city had to be accountable and that should have been empowered for managing their own content and local information and in terms of the academic system, all of them should be integrated in real time.
4. Scope re-delimitation: At this stage, it was necessary to double check the whole documentation, processes, internal planning, and impact, in order to delimit the scope of the project and to create and verify the user's cases. we will be working on 2 different projects from the digital point of view, and undertaking active part of the internal changes, processes and evolution.
5. Timeline : This project was now a set of two and forecasted to be developed in a timeframe of 1 year.
6. Infrastructure configuration: SeeD helped the IT department of the Center to set up,and optimize their needed internal infrastructure, but also provided the specialized cloud for the project where the site and system were to be launched.
7. The Go-live Process. With such a big change and impact, our team worked along with the client during 3 weeks.
8. The site was launched in compliance with all the client's requirements including the academic system, with great results.
About the project
- The courses schedule before the launch was defined and implemented manually; this was a 1 week task for one of the specialists at the center every month. And now, it takes just a few clicks and no more than 15 minutes to set it up.
- The system also brings those special discounts programs and scholarships with more than 50 variations to a new, dgital , controlled and accountable way.
- Digital invoice, notifications and more benefits make a big impact for the Center.
- Those goals had to be taken into account as well as some general points such as the capability of the users to search information, make payments, had their invoices and inscriptions autogenerated, and interact with the Center in all possible ways, not forgetting social media.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal has proven to be the right choice for educational organizations to undertake a serious Digital Transformation process ; the adoption of Drupal amongst universities and a lot of schools around the world and here in Colombia is very high; it has been more and more adopted with excellent results and very good levels of satisfaction.
Drupal commerce was also tested and selected for those special business needs, it gives all the options to set up a very complex payment system like this one.
These are some of the reasons why the Colombo Americano Center has chosen Drupal, we were sure that the CMS capabilities of the platform would be a total fit for their needs.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Colombo Americano Center has multiple course offers and those with different features and variables, including time, teachers, spots offered, pre-inscriptions, values, etc. . Organic Groups allowed the separation of these features with the uso of somo others like views and webforms. The Drupal commerce suite give us the power to achieve all the possibilities an variations of the business.. ECK provided the possibility of creating elements that were not necessarily web sites . By doing this, it was possible to include new components that would improve the user experience.
