Saving a German Pharma company > 2,200 complex activities in a few months, and beyond!

For this week’s blog, we wanted to shed some light on the details of a complex client use case. We always emphasise how versatile, agnostic and powerful Harmonizer is, and also how our partnerships work so well for resolving complex data problems together. Hollow words on their own, we know ☺️!

A concrete example will bring to life what these words mean in practice.

The upshot

A German Pharmaceutical company is one of our clients. To power their external professional education offering work, they implemented CoursePath, learning management software offered by Fellow Digitals. Their other partner, face to face GmbH, worked with them to get this offering out to the market and their customers, and drive value.

Fellow Digitals and face to face subsequently teamed up with Harmonizer to automate, optimise and simplify data management and data governance of customer training programs.

How it all began

After implementation of CoursePath, which brought much needed structure to our Client’s courses, their Event Management team and face to face found themselves doing lots of manual work. This had to do with the course and participant administration taking place across three systems.

1. First of all, there was CoursePath as a learning management solution. In CoursePath, our Client’s courses are hosted, and it also holds registration, attendance and participant data.
2. Secondly, GoTo Webinar is used as a vehicle to offer our Client’s courses to participants, in a convenient, online manner. If a participant attends 75% of a webinar, they are marked as a pass. After this, you can proceed to the next course of the learning pathway.
3. And finally, our Client maintains customer data in their CRM (AUREA), including who passed which courses and who is registered for which courses.

Considering these three systems, it becomes clear that the customer data should be utilised and needed to be kept up to date, dare we say it, harmoniously (pun intended).

At this stage, that often meant replicating master data, registrations and attendance across three systems by hand. A download of GoTo Webinar needed to be used to calculate completion rates for each participant, identify those who passed, and subsequently this needed to be updated in CoursePath and our Client’s CRM. Moreover, any registrations received (and at this stage there were many different channels), needed to be processed manually in CoursePath and GoTo Webinar as well.

Needless to say, our Client and face to face weren’t overjoyed with this level of manual activity.

Therefore, it was imperative to reduce manual touch points.

ChallengeAccepted

This is what we love to do at Harmonizer. Because it really shows the value of our product above all other mid-market offerings.

We rolled up our sleeves and started working on this three-way integration.

Initially, the idea was that all future registrations were to be funnelled via the CRM in terms of user data. The user data in the CRM would flow to CoursePath, which would be used for registrations, and then flow to GoTo Webinar, for user and registration data. Conversely, the attendance and pass marks, would flow the other way, with the source of truth being GoTo Webinar, which would then update CoursePath, and the CRM in turn.

In theory, this sounds amazing and simple. However, it surely wasn’t a fairy-tale…

As we live in an ever-evolving world, the project also evolved during integration. As a result, processes had to be rethought several times as requirements and systems changed. For example, there were courses that run independently off Go to Webinar and for those, a different integration approach had to be used. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the data in CoursePath as well as in our Client’s CRM had to be up-to-date.

Of course, that was no reason for us to give up, neither for our partners, face to face and Fellow Digitals. We worked together to find solutions and get the systems up and running.

Through all of these changes and challenges, we figured out on a case-by-case basis if integration and automation was worth it, because it wasn't always. We learned from the initial misunderstandings and defined better workflows, roles and responsibilities for the future. And finally, we even improved the logging and monitoring rules of the Harmonizer integration platform - everyone was able to take something away from this project.

The result was that all of Harmonizer's integration challenges were solved (on a technical level, this meant running a large number of "workers" with nearly 50 worker blocks each).

Did they live happily ever after?

In the end, we achieved the goal of reducing manual activities, and then some: the client's CRM, GoTo Webinar, and Coursepath applications are currently synchronized in a multi-directional flow, including data transformations for process optimisation.

For the user there is only one platform - Coursepath- here they can find all information about courses, their progress and also certificates for passed courses.

Everything else, data transfers, confirmations including dial-in links to webinars etcetera, is handled by Harmonizer behind the scenes.

A welcome side effect for the staff involved is a significant reduction in the amount of email associated with manual system updates, registrations, cancellations, and the like.

The bottom line

Harmonizer has saved manual activity for 2,200 course registrations after a few months of successful operation of this multi-directional integration. Across three systems and with multiple touch points per system, we will let you imagine the time, frustration and cost associated with this saving.

As said, achieving this fantastic result was no easy feat. There were many hurdles that needed to be overcome. Since all parties involved were open, flexible and professional, the end-result was better than originally anticipated, as well as innovative. It is a new use case for face to face, Fellow Digitals and Harmonizer, which we are now ready to exploit further and conquer the market with!

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash