The Christian Education Group (COG) is the umbrella foundation of the affiliated schools in the Vallei and Gelderland-Midden region. The COG has approximately 10,000 students and more than 1,000 employees, 30 of whom work in the IT department. COG was looking for a partner to, on the one hand, provide support in the field of Oracle BI Publisher (as part of the OSIRIS student information system) and, on the other hand, to help think about alternatives for better functioning. A few months ago, it became CCM in the Cloud platform implemented at COG. Together with Bert Pik, IT manager at COG and Erik Bakelaar, team application coordinator at COG, we look back on this project.

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Looking for a sustainable solution

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“In the summer of 2021, we switched from the Eduarte student information system to OSIRIS. For the document flows that are in the system, OSIRIS uses BI-Publisher. At the time 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 available in the market. In addition, with each release of OSIRIS, we saw various reports and documents stop working due to continuous changes in the underlying data model,” says Erik.

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“At the time, we had two options when it comes to document flows; either we sharpen our BI publisher knowledge or we look for a more sustainable solution. For us, it was particularly important that expertise was available. We also found it important to have a stable solution to have where we were in control. Because of my previous job, I had already worked with Harmony, so I knew their CCM in the Cloud solution. We then got in touch and saw if we could use CCM in the Cloud for our document flows,” says Bert.

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Challenging project

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“For us, the focus was mainly on the documents that we had already created in BI-Publisher and that kept failing each time we released. That is why we asked Harmony to build a document in CCM in the Cloud as a pilot so that we could assess it in terms of time taken, layout and workability. What made the project challenging is that we made a conscious choice to deviate from the standard OSIRIS/BI publisher route and had to look under the hood from time to time to do so. This meant that it was not always easy to get certain things moving. What I liked was that Harmony was very flexible about this and continued to think about solutions to certain issues and did everything in its power to address this,” says Bert.

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Conclusion

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“The collaboration with Harmony went very smoothly and we are pleased that we found a sustainable solution with CCM in the Cloud. Of course, the platform offers much more than what we use now. The options in terms of output are also very relevant to us. We are therefore looking at other options, such as applying digital signing to our educational agreements for more efficient processing and to shorten the turnaround time. In short, we will continue to look for ways to improve how we work,” says Erik.

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Want to know more about our CCM in the Cloud solution? Then take informal contact with us.

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