San Diego State University – Data Architecture and SalesForce

Business Background

For over 40 years San Diego State University (SDSU) Global Campus has offered extended studies to students both regionally and around the world.  It currently offers more than 50 certificate programs as well as career advance courses in everything from management and leadership to accounting and web design.  Unlike a traditional college, SDSU Global Campus’s sustainability is contingent on student enrollment as it does not rely on government funding.  In that way, every potential student is a potential customer.  

Business Challenge

SDSU Global Campus relied on a CRM to track students throughout their customer lifecycle.  They used Salesforce to manage student leads and convert them to enrolled students, carrying them all the way through their completed studies.   Like many organizations however, they didn’t know how to optimize their CRM platform.  On top of the shortcomings of their Salesforce system, the school’s data architecture was lacking in modernization and failed to meet the demands of their data-driven business processes.  Their systems relied on manual data captures that required time consuming human intervention whenever jobs failed.  Staff members struggled with duplicate information that resulted in wasted repeated efforts and costly unnecessary storage.  

How Xcelacore Solved the Challenge

The Dean of the school reached out to us for assistance.  The Dean had formerly served at UCLA and was familiar with our team after working with us on a project over there.  After witnessing the struggle experienced by the school’s internal technology team, the Dean wanted to bring us in to overcome their inherent challenges to get them to where a university of their stature should be today.

We were assigned two missions: 

• Modernize the school’s data architecture to allow them to embed data monetization into their organizational strategies
• Optimize their existing Salesforce platform to streamline processes, simplify the user experience and improve productivity 

As always, we started out by interviewing their staff and stakeholders to find out what their data requirements were and what they wanted their data to accomplish.  We quickly realized the need to customize their Salesforce solution and incorporate better data visualization tools to make the data more actionable and insightful for users.  It wasn’t long before users could quickly run reports that used to take a week to complete due to the manual inefficiencies of the former system.  This superior ease of use encouraged greater utilization of the system in daily decision making.  We then set out to convert their old data structures into a format that was more understandable and usable.  The team redesigned the architectural  structure to better integrate their existing technologies and make their collective data more accessible.  We then streamlined the data mining process by automating their data system, thus increasing the accuracy and consistency of data analysis.  Xcelacore continues to work with them in a long-term relationship to help them achieve their technology benchmarks and business objectives

Our experience with SDSU is a case study that points to our technical expertise, clearly showing the value that our customers derive from our services.  It is a perfect example of how our team comes highly recommended by former clients.  At Xcelacore, we don’t utilize expensive marketing campaigns to attract new clients.  Word of mouth proves to be our biggest marketing tool, and that is something we are proud of.

The Results

The team redesigned the architectural  structure to better integrate their existing technologies and make their collective data more accessible.