About EC English Language Centres
Established in 1991 in Malta, EC English Language Centres offers short or long-term courses across 23 schools in the US, Canada, Malta, the UK, South Africa and Ireland. As one of the largest international language schools in the world, EC English Language Centres provides tuition to more than 40,000 students each year.
Improved efficiencies through Business Intelligence
The Challenge
The growth and internationalisation of EC English Language Centres created the need for a comprehensive Business Intelligence (BI) solution to unify ever-growing amount of business data available.
"The business data we had was dispersed, and the creation of reports was time-consuming and prone to error,” Business Development Manager Rainer Buttigieg explained.
EC English Language Centres required a set of metrics for measuring and monitoring financials, debtors, sales, operations and empowering stakeholders with a reliable data dashboard that would enable them to take the best business decisions and support operational planning. The company was looking for a Business Analytics solution to support sales forecasting and control sales performance by carrying out reports on different sales channels. Crucially, the company was seeking integrated reporting for the data captured from various sources.
"Operational planning was carried out manually, however, with a view to business growth and internationalisation we needed a solution that could automate and speed up the process of class scheduling, students’ allocation into the groups, accommodation and leisure management". - Mr Buttigieg added.
Ease of use and fast take-up of the Business Intelligence solution was also crucial for EC English Language Centres. Top management, finance teams, school managers, sales, academics and operation managers had to be able to access the reports easily so they can make timely decisions without being dependent on IT department.
The Solution
All of this translated into a single, easy-to-use portal with a set of reports that can be instantly accessed by the users of EC English Language Centres.
“Eunoia's solution stood out for its unified data model and for its flexibility and ease of creating reports. We can now control, monitor and measure our business performance faster and easier. Using the Necto interactive dashboard, users can drill down to a granular level, spot trends and share findings across the company. We have improved the communication and sharing of relevant business information throughout the entire organisation. Today, we are indeed a data-driven organisation".
Since the start of the implementation in November 2013, the use of this BI tool has grown enormously across the organisation. Today, more than 120 users are accessing it every day. This solution has become the central planning and reporting resource. Time-saving and intuitive, the solution now has more than 1,000 in-built reports, includes new data sets and business metrics.
"Scalability and flexibility was another important requirement. When the company is growing internationally, one needs to accommodate different legislation and different ways of working. Eunoia's BI solution has proven to be scalable and flexible to make modifications and integrate future business requirements", explained Mr Buttigieg.
The Results
Single source of truth enabled accessibility to a much broader scope of information and ensured better planning and control. "The business analytics solution brought benefits and improvement in Finance, Operations, Accommodation, Sales and Marketing areas. Teams of different departments are now spending more time analysing reports themselves, safe in the knowledge that data is reliable. We have managed to create a structured environment of KPIs and dashboards and speed up decision-making processes," Mr Buttigieg said.