PSP Automates Bursary Process for Awarding Body

Our business analysts recently supported the automation of the bursary application process for a global awarding body.

Through the bursary, candidates can gain the practical skills and qualifications that are required by the industry. The bursary includes training, assessment and registration fees for the approved chosen qualification.

Before the start of the project, candidates after approval of the bursary would have to wait until their application and qualification had manually been created by the awarding body.

Before, students would have to wait until the awarding body inputted that data into their CRM, making it a long and labour-intensive process. Our business analysts helped the client set up a Bursary entity in the CRM so that student information is automatically inputted into the CRM and integrated with the student’s online account. 

As the new process had to be in place in time for the academic year, we worked to a very strict deadline. Therefore, as part of the work, we identified areas for improvement for the second phase of the project, so that our business analysts can enhance the client’s online bursary application process going forward.

What Did Our Business Analysts Do?

A major focus of the project was on the user journey, the simplicity of the web forms and streamlining the workflows.

They captured all the requirements to determine where things were heavily manual and identified how to automate them. For example, the customer operations teams had to individually upload all details into the CRM to determine the qualifications of each student who was accepted for the bursary.

Now, the CRM sees the student has been approved for a bursary and simply like all other students, completes their student registration online which then updates their online account automatically with the deductions.

The system also alerts the individual training providers when one of their students has been accepted for a bursary with useful resources and information.

The deductions are automatically applied when completing the online Student registration. This saved considerable labour for staff and the ability for members to be able to apply online on one simple form significantly improves the user experience.

As part of the project, the client enlisted the support of multiple areas of PSP, including business analysts, software and web developers, manual testers and automated testers.

One of the tests that our software testing team performed was API testing to ensure the CRM properly integrated with the student portal. As well as this, our manual testers certified the performance and functionality of the new process.

The new online bursary application process has simplified the user process for all candidates applying for a bursary and automated a huge amount of work for customer operations teams.