The inefficiencies of internal users in Emeritus hampered productivity and resulted in greater salary overhead.

Emeritus’ engineering teams were responsible for building all of their own internal tools; and as an operationally-heavy company, there was a lot to get done. Major pain point for internal users was the number of disconnected systems and the inability to look at and piece together information from multiple systems in one place. Bhushan Heda - CTO, Matthew Delaney - CDO of Emeritus & Meg McCafferty - Head of Internal Systems, run the development for the Emeritus team – a group of engineers and operators responsible for the customer experience in course enrolment. Building internal tools for their team was tedious but critical. These disconnects made simple tasks laborious and impacted their ability to serve their customers quickly and accurately.

From months to a few days

Prior to using ToolJet, the Emeritus team built internal interfaces to their enrolment platform as part of overall product design, but with minimal emphasis on operational efficiency or user interfaces. They wanted to create efficiency for their course delivery teams as well as their enterprise enrolment platform.

Emeritus implemented ToolJet by creating a POC application for their course delivery team. “We set up self-hosted ToolJet with very few numbers of users. The Head of Internal Systems worked with business stakeholders to map the needed functionality. A single staff person on the product team (not the dev team) fluent in SQL and JavaScript created the first version of the POC app in a matter of days as an addition to her normal responsibilities.” After several iterations over the next few weeks, they released the POC app to the delivery managers, who used it for 2+ weeks before they started rolling the app out to a higher number of users. Currently, the team is focused on creating efficiency for their course delivery teams, who work across multiple systems to manage the participant experience. Also, they are developing an improved internal interface to their enterprise enrolment platform.They have not made any substantial changes in their system. “The addition of ToolJet presents opportunities to rethink how we can minimise engineering resources for back-end interfaces to our products and leverage internal tools instead.”

Result

Emeritus’ internal systems team is using ToolJet to build full-fledged applications, but the data science and learning teams are looking into how they can leverage it. Both developers and end users recognised the potential ToolJet has to transform their internal business. “We should scale to 3-10 developers and potentially 300-500 end users in the next few months. That number could be 1000+ at scale over the next year.”