case study
Customer Profile : Irish Taxation Institute (ITI)
The Irish Taxation Institute (ITI) is the examining and professional standards body for the tax profession in Ireland. The Institute offers a range of professional training programmes. It educates, informs, represents and sets standards for tax advisers. Apart from a one-year and three-year formal qualification programmes, the ITI also has a wide range of professional development programmes, ranging from annual conferences to tailored training for individual organisations.
The Challenge
The Institute of Taxation in Ireland (ITI) required a new Student Administration System that would provide one central platform for all customer contact that would unlock new advances in available technologies as well as future-proofing for further advances.
Objective
- Provide an exemplary online student management experience
- To provide a scalable, stable and secure system with high redundancy and reliability.
- To accommodate the anticipated growth of their student and member database
- To create a more user-friendly system that would empower the Institute’s workforce to carry out their routine work efficiently.
- To provide the management with detailed reporting for effective decision-making.
- To provide web-based access to student and member details
Key Challenges
- To promote and facilitate effective sponsorship of the project.
- To understand the user perspective of a requirement and deliver exactly as specified and anticipated by all the stakeholders.
- To ensure that the necessary processes were in place to handle the inevitable change requests that occurs on such large projects.
- To plan for an elaborate data cleansing and migration exercises so that the transition from the existing legacy system is smooth and seamless
Solution
The solution was developed as a browser-based client utilizing .Net and SQL Server 2000 technologies.
MerrionIT worked closely with ITI in the planning stage to ensure that both the graphic design (the UI) and functionality of the system met all requirements. To support the written specification document, MerrionIT built an interactive prototype of the deliverable StudentPlus system. Every prospective user of the new system was given an opportunity to review and give feedback on design, usability, flexibility and completeness.
MerrionIT produced a new database design based on the old database and additional requirements outlined in the brief. A data cleansing exercise had been carried out on the old database and a migration exercise had been carried out into the new design retaining the data relevance and also relationships.
StudentPlus provided an extensive administration and management system allowing ITI to update the master data of the system right from users to the business information on a needs be basis.
StudentPlus also provided for an exhaustive reporting mechanism in the form of charts as well as graphs and with all the reports being exportable to excel. The reporting mechanism provided interface to generate reports based specific data and search criteria.
Benefits
- Single platform, Robust and Scalable solution.
- Extensive MIS system capable of evolving as new requirements arise
- System is intuitive and simple to use – therefore users need just a couple of hours training to learn how to operate.
- Easy to use administration management system allows ITI to assign access rights for each area with a single click.
- Administrator facility to carry out internal audits on the quality of the information available and carry out maintenance activities to keep the data up to date.
- Save employee time. Some of the routine reports and jobs that required the staff to long hours compiling them are now a click away.
- Capability to integrate easily with peripheral systems
Technologies Used
- ASP .Net
- Visual Basic .Net
- Server 2000
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