De Christelijke Onderwijsgroep (COG) is the umbrella foundation of the affiliated schools in the Vallei and Gelderland-Midden region. COG has around 10,000 students and more than 1,000 employees, 30 of whom work in the IT department. COG was looking for a partner to provide support with Oracle BI Publisher (as part of the OSIRIS student information system) on the one hand, and to help think about alternatives that would work better on the other. A few months ago, the CCM in the Cloud platform was implemented at COG. Together with Bert Pik, IT manager at COG, and Erik Bakelaar, application team coordinator at COG, we look back on this project.
Looking for a sustainable solution
"In the summer of 2021, we switched from the Eduarte student information system to OSIRIS. For the document flows in the system, OSIRIS uses BI-Publisher. When we switched systems, we had no knowledge of OSIRIS or BI-Publisher. We quickly noticed that BI-Publisher was not flexible enough and that there was little knowledge of it available in the market. On top of that, with every OSIRIS release we saw various reports and documents stop working, because of constant changes in the underlying data model," says Erik.
"At that point we had two options for the document flows: either we sharpen our BI-Publisher knowledge, or we look for a more sustainable solution. For us, it was especially important that expertise was available. We also found it important to have a stable solution where we were in control ourselves. I had already worked with Harmony in my previous job, so I knew their CCM in the Cloud (now: CustomerConnect) solution. So we got in touch and looked at whether we could use CCM in the Cloud for our document flows," says Bert.
A challenging project
"For us, the focus was mainly on the documents we had already built in BI-Publisher, which kept failing with every release. So we asked Harmony to rebuild one document in CCM in the Cloud as a pilot, so that we could assess it in terms of time spent, layout and workability. What made the project challenging is that we made a conscious choice to depart from the standard OSIRIS/BI-Publisher route, and that meant we sometimes had to look under the bonnet. So it was not always easy to get certain things moving. What I liked was that Harmony was very flexible about this, kept helping to think of solutions for certain issues and did everything it could to tackle them," says Bert.
Conclusion
"The collaboration with Harmony went very smoothly, and we are pleased that we have found a sustainable solution in CCM in the Cloud. Of course, the platform offers much more than what we use now. The possibilities for output are also very relevant to us. So we are looking at other possibilities, such as applying digital signing to our education agreements, to process them more efficiently and shorten the turnaround time. In short, we keep looking for ways to improve how we work," says Erik.
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