• Eduvos says that its new partnership with Braintree has seen its “tedious” registration process streamlined with a number of benefits.
• What was once a 90-day process involving 80 page applications per student has now been automated down to just under an hour.
• Unfortunately, this also meant that the 120 temporary workers that Eduvos usually hired for the registration period were no longer required this year.

In April, Microsoft’s President for Africa Lillian Barnard said that generative AI and automation has the potential to change the continent’s business landscape. Now, Eduvos, a local education provider, one of the largest in the country says that Microsoft’s technology has helped it do just that.

Eduvos struck a partnership with Braintree, who aided the educator in implementing a streamlined Microsoft and Dynamics 365 solution that has simplified its student registration process which usually takes around 90 days of tedious work per student, to just under an hour.

The private education provider says that the solution has also “more than doubled” their enrolment numbers at the same time.

Eduvos, in a statement shared with Hypertext, said that the decision to implement the solution emerged from “having previously struggled with a manual enrolment process and fragmented operating landscape.”

With 12 campuses and offering 20 accredited qualifications, student enrollment was a complex process involving an application of over 80 pages that required to be signed by hand.

Now, with the Microsoft solution Eduvos says that “real-time insights are now available across finance, students, academics, human resources, and faculty. Disjointed processes, conflicting KPIs from each team and weeks of reconciliation are now things of the past.”

“Things happen much faster now, it’s almost instantaneous,” enthuses Dr Riaan Steenberg, pictured above, executive director at Eduvos.

“Our main obstacle was integration—without it, the different departments could not communicate with each other. Visibility, or the lack thereof, was the primary motivator to begin our digital transformation,” says Steenberg.

For Braintree, a Microsoft partner that handled the implementation through their team, the biggest challenge was the Eduvos timeline. The system needed to be completed and operational ahead of the 2024 academic year, with “enormous amounts of data” needing integration.

“Within a matter of months, every facet of student life from enrolment to course completion was integrated into Microsoft, with real time access to all required resources. This transformation has also resulted in a reduction in associated costs by as much as 90 percent,” Eduvos beams in the statement.

“In addition to this, from a finance and operations perspective, all finance processes, budgeting, and expense management have also been integrated into the Microsoft solution. This financial integration also now empowers students to be able to access statements and documentation online.

Unfortunately, it is not all good news. Eduvos also said that the 90-day “tedious” process also required the company to hire 120 “temporary workers” to aid the institution with all of the registrations. Microsoft’s seamless and connected system has meant that these workers were no longer required.

While this adds extra budget for Eduvos, in South Africa’s employment landscape this particular highlight is a bitter pill to swallow and likely part of a trend we’ll be seeing for the foreseeable future.

[Image – Provided]