Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Child Care Provider Expects to Improve Data Access, Expand Business with New Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Education
Customer Profile
Learning Care Group provides child care, preschool, and school-age educational services to children through 470 corporate-owned and franchised centers in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Business Situation
The child care centers use a management solution that requires manual processes that are time-consuming and prone to error. And because of the system’s architecture and reporting, the company makes decisions based on data that is several days old.
Solution
Learning Care Group is deploying a solution based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and a service-oriented architecture to centralize data and improve information access.
Benefits
Increased efficiency and data accuracy
Offline and mobile access
Improved decision making
Easier administration
Expanded business opportunities / “We’re going to gain anywhere from five to eight days of visibility into how our business is doing. That provides us with more time to make an adjustment ifwe have to.”
Christopher Pesola, Associate Director of Application Services, Learning Care Group
Learning Care Group is a provider of early childhood care and education. Currently, the company’s 470 corporate-owned and franchised centers manage daily operations with client software that uses isolated, local databases. The company wants to improve the way it collects and analyzes information from all the centers. Centers manually back up data and send files to the corporate office for reporting and payroll purposes, creating lag times for analyzing financial and center-specific information. With help from NuSoft Solutions, Learning Care Group is building a Microsoft® .NET–connected solution based on a service-oriented architecture. With the new solution, which will include a centralized database and use Web services for data exchange, the company expects to access information in near real time, improve data accuracy, and expand its business.
Situation
Learning Care Group provides child care and education for children between the ages of six weeks and 12 years. Based in Novi, Michigan, the publicly traded company has 7,400 employees and conducts businesses through its wholly owned subsidiaries, ChildtimeLearningCenters and Tutor Time Child Care/Learning Centers. During the fiscal year that ended in April 2004, Learning Care Group operated or franchised a total of 470 centers and had licensed capacity to serve more than 50,000 children.
To manage daily operations, the child care centers use software that tracks information such as child check-in and check-out times, employee hours, program activities, parent contact information, and billing. However, that information is not centralized. The software runs on client computers and uses alarge number of Microsoft® Access—based databases—the corporate-owned centers have a total of 335 databases.
Gathering and analyzing information from all the centers requires time-consuming manual processes. For example, franchises, which pay royalty fees to Learning Care Group, print their accounts receivable reports every month and fax them to the corporate office. Workers then manually enter that information into the company’s accounting system. Also, the directors of corporate-owned centers manually back up their data weekly and submit files to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site. Employees at the corporate office then use that information to run reports and prepare the payroll, which is completed by an outsourced payroll company.
Moreover, if centers fail to perform backups and later lose the data, they have to reenter that information manually. The company estimates that each center spends a minimum of 8 to 12 hours a week on such manual tasks.
Learning Care Group wants to streamline these tasks so that its centers can concentrate on more important duties. “We need to maintain the focus of having content families and safe, happy children and getting more enrollments, which will result in more revenue,” says Christopher Pesola, Associate Director of Application Services at Learning Care Group.
Learning Care Group also seeks to improve the timeliness and accuracy of its data. Because companywide reporting involves many time-consuming processes, corporate officers make decisions based on data that isseveral days old. In addition, when that data includes discrepancies, it takes even more time to resolve. Users can enter various types of information into the databases, so the data could be inconsistent across the company.
“The biggest incentive for finding a new solution was the financial reporting,” Pesola says. “We were not comfortable with our gathering of financial data. We got to a point where we had to act.”
Learning Care Group decided to replace its system with a solution that includes a centralized database. The company also wanted additional features, such as Web-based reporting, which would enhance operations and improve business opportunities.
Solution
Learning Care Group considered a few off-the-shelf software products designed for the management of childcare centers, but none of those products offered a solution specifically for enterprises. The company then looked into building a new system using either the Microsoft .NET Framework or Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). After researching the technologies, Pesola says, the company concluded that the .NET Framework would provide better functionality and a shorter time-to-market than the J2EE. What’s more, the Framework—which isanintegral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications—would integrate seamlessly with the Microsoft technology already in use at the company.
Learning Care Group requested proposals from technology consultants, choosing Microsoft Gold Certified Partner NuSoft Solutions in March 2004. NuSoft spent four months learning about the company’s needs and using the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology to define solution requirements. MSF, which is a set of software development processes, principles, and proven practices, will be used throughout the project.
NuSoft is currently building the solution’s first version, which will go live in April 2005 and will include an improved check-in/check-out system, a centralized database, and Web-based reporting. A second version, to go live a few months after the first, will add a parent portal and other features.
Based on a smart client application model and a service-oriented architecture, the solution will use loosely coupled Web services for data exchange. To benefit from the rich user interface features available in the Windows operating system, the solution will be built on Windows Forms in the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. The new system will offer an improved user experience and the ability to work offline. In addition, it will enable the company to easily incorporate future development.
Using a new smart client application, parents in each center will check their children in and out. The check-in/check-out system will feature an interface that is easier to use than the current solution and will offer parents valuable information, such as center activity schedules and payment notices. Parents will also be able to see alerts about upcoming events and can choose to have information sent to them in e-mail messages.
“We need to give parents an incentive to use the check-in screen, because today some parents don’t check in their children, and that becomes a ratio issue for us,” Pesola says. To meet state and federal government regulations, child care centers need to make sure that all children in the center are checked in and that proper teacher-student ratios are maintained. The new check in/check-out system will help Learning Care Group meet those regulations by alerting center directors when children are not checked in. Employees will also use the check-in/check-out application to enter when they begin and finish work, as well as to see information such as their work schedules and the number of vacation days they have available.
Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software, will store all information gathered by the new solution. Area managers, regional managers, and corporate executives will access key business indicators through Web services and a Web portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, also part of Windows Server System, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Using a customizable dashboard, managers will be able to see information for a particular center or multiple centers in near real time. They will be able to perform custom analysis and reporting with SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services and SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
In the second version of the solution, a portal based on SharePoint Portal Server and Web services will give parents access to information over the Internet. For example, parents will be able to find out whether a center is accepting children for enrollment, submit an application for their child, pay online, check their account balance online, and see what their child is learning that day. “All that information and all those activities will be available through the portal so that parents are always aware of what’s going on with their children,” says Pesola.
As another part of the second version, Learning Care Group plans to use Web services to electronically reconcile payments with bank accounts and to receive payments from government agencies that subsidize services.
NuSoft Solutions is building the solution using prerelease versions of the .NET Framework 2.0 and the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system. Ken Young, Chief Technology Officer at NuSoft Solutions, says that he expects his company to develop the solution twice as fast as it could if it were using technology from other vendors. “We don’t have to write as much code ourselves because of the prebuilt pieces of code included in the .NET Framework,” Young says. “It’s a lot of code, but putting it together is quick, and all the pieces are designed to work together.” By using Windows Forms 2.0, NuSoft Solutions can streamline development and create rich user-interface graphics and controls. In addition, the Framework supports a variety of client operating systems, including the Microsoft Windows 98 operating system. As a result, Learning Care Group can run the solution without having to upgrade its workstations.
The solution will authenticate users with the Active Directory® service in the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the foundation of Windows Server System. Learning Care Group will manage the solution using Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, a Windows Server System software product that monitors system health and sends alerts about event and performance issues.
Benefits
With the .NET-connected solution, Learning Care Group will connect with its customers, employees, and partners. The company will save time by automating manual tasks. In addition, it will gain easy and immediate access to business information for improved decision making. “The overall change that this solution is going to effect at our company is going to be overwhelming,” Pesola says. “It’s unbelievable how much people are interested in certain pieces of data that they can’t get to today. I’m excited about what this solution could provide to them and the company.”
Increased Efficiency
Learning Care Group expects to improve efficiency by eliminating many manual tasks. For example, centers will no longer need to submit files to an FTP site because the data will be available in the solution’s central database. The company will also be able to automate tasks using Web services. The solution will electronically transfer payroll changes, such as a new employee or updated contact information for a current employee, to the company’s PeopleSoft system. This automation is expected to save 16 hours per week—the amount of time that office workers who are responsible for payroll changes now spend on manual payroll tasks.
The new check-in/check-out application will also speed processes because it will be easier to use than the current solution. “We’re streamlining the user interface,” Pesola says. “We’re taking away a lot of clicks and making the interface more consistent. The current application has buttons everywhere; we’re always searching for where to click next.”
More Accurate Financial Data
With a centralized database and the elimination of many error-prone manual tasks, Learning Care Group expects to improve the accuracy of its financial data. “Today, an audit is a very long and difficult process because the auditors randomly pick a center and have to dig through an Access database to get the information that they need,” Pesola says. “With the new solution, we’ll have a very simple, intuitive, and clean database for them to look at, so the audit process is going to go much more smoothly.”
Offline and Mobile Access
At first, Learning Care Group wanted an entirely Web-based solution. However, the company realized that a smart client solution offered a major advantage because users could work offline. “That is a huge benefit for us,” Pesola says. “We can’t afford to have a center be inoperable just because its Internet connection is down.”
And for managers who are often on the road, the solution’s reporting component provides access to information from wherever they are. Learning Care Group is looking into providing wireless network cards for the managers’ portable computers, and the company is also testing personal digital assistants and Web-enabled mobile phones. “Today, traveling managers don’t have access to a center’s information unless they physically drive to the center or they have an Access database sent to them in an e-mail message,” Pesola says. “Being able to get to their dashboard and their data whenever they want, through the Internet, is going to be a big time savings for our area and regional managers.”
Improved Decision Making
Managers and corporate executives will have immediate access to information about a particular center or a group of centers. Currently, if the corporate office wants to know why a certain center has low revenue, it can take a few days to find and report on that information. “With the new solution, area managers will be able to log on to their dashboard and customize it to what they want to see, and the information is near real time,” Pesola says. For example, a manager could view all labor hours for the week, then look at the hours for a particular center on a specific day.“We could then call the center and say, ‘Five employees had overtime on Thursday, what happened?’” Pesola says. “We can’t do that today.”
Furthermore, with faster and easier access toimportant business information, Learning Care Group will be able to make better business decisions. “We’re going to gain anywhere from five to eight days of visibility into how our business is doing,” says Pesola. “That provides us with more time to make an adjustment if we have to.”
Easier System Administration
By providing a centralized solution database, Learning Care Group will be able to back up data consistently, helping to ensure the availability of data and eliminating manual backups at each center. “The centers won’t have to worry about the availability of data,” Pesola says.
In addition, the company will be able to provide better technical support to the centers. If a client computer goes down at a center, the center will be able to add a new computer to the network and then synchronize it with the central database. “The center can be back up quickly, and that will save our help desk a lot of time,” says Pesola.
Learning Care Group will also be able to update the smart client application easily. To update the current system, the company mails disks to the centers and often has to hire technical consultants to help install the updates. Because the smart client application will be built using Windows Forms in the .NET Framework and deployed with the Windows Forms ClickOnce technology, it will offer no-touch deployment. Learning Care Group will be able to deploy an update to aWeb server, and the Framework will automatically download the update to the client computer. “It’s a beautifully simple process,” says Pesola.
Extensible Architecture
The solution’s service-oriented architecture will give Learning Care Group the flexibility to add features as the business changes and grows. For example, the company will be able to create modules to meet the needs of franchises, such as integrating the solution with the various accounting systems used by the franchises.
Expanded Business Opportunities
With the use of Microsoft technologies, Learning Care Group expects to gain a competitive advantage and expand its business. The nearly real-time access to data and the ability for parents to pay online will differentiate the company from its competitors. In addition, the Framework support for multiple currencies and languages will help the company begin to do business in other countries.
“Our industry traditionally hasn’t been focused on technology,” Pesola says. “We plan to grow in the franchise area, and the advanced technology of this solution gives us a greater opportunity to sell franchises.”