NZQA saves time by reducing manual work through Power Platform.

Objective

Replace a legacy system that represented business continuity risk that was costly to maintain with a flexible solution that would grow with NZQA’s need to provide more services to their customers.

Challenge

New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s role in the education sector is to ensure that New Zealand qualifications are accepted as credible and robust, nationally and internationally, in order to help learners succeed in their chosen endeavours and to contribute to New Zealand society.

As a part of this, NZQA is responsible for managing the New Zealand Qualification Framework and ensuring in that the qualifications are quality assured against this Framework, both nationally and internationally.

NZQA had embarked on a review internally to ensure that their processes and systems to enable those processes were updated for business continuity. Their old way of working was via excel spreadsheets with manual workflows and a legacy system that was old, costly and hard to maintain.

The business unit that was first cab off the rank for NZQA was the Quality Assurance division, which recognised overseas qualifications and matched them against a register of already approved qualifications.

NZQA’s old system was run-down and costly to maintain. It was not straightforward to extract useful insights such as how long a case had been in the system for or why some were processed quickly, and some more slowly.

Solution

Magnetism responded to the RFP and were selected with one other vendor to participate in a Proof of Concept – where a part of the workflow needed to be proven with the proposed system. Within a small two-to-three-week POC, Magnetism proved that not only the Power Platform was going to work for NZQA, but the team worked well with each other too.

Magnetism took time to understand the Quality Assurance business unit and proposed that a PowerApps portal authenticated using Azure B2C sitting in front of Dynamics 365 case management and workflow solution would fit NZQA’s needs.

A typical application to the portal and into the system would be an overseas user, who was planning on travelling to New Zealand to either work or study, who would have already earned a qualification. They would create an account on the portal, then fill out an application which would include contact information, information about their qualification and upload important documents such as passport information that is held securely in SharePoint.

The application is then submitted into the Power Platform back-end and an internal workflow is kicked off utilising the out of the box business process flows and workflow engine. This enables the assessment team to work through an application and allows managers to understand how many assessments have been sitting in each of the stages and for how long. This has greatly improved reporting and reduced manual work for the users.

When the application is approved, Power Automate creates a e-recognition statement and automatically uploads that to their profile and sends an email to the user. This automation has meant significant time saved for the NZQA quality assurance team.

Through this portal, users can now also login at any time during the review process to understand where their application is at, to get real time updates – dynamically from Dynamics 365.

The team now has a contact record for all those that have submitted and they also have their details on file in a secure and easy to find location. Through the system, they can keep one source of truth for their details, where previously, this was all maintained in different spots with conflicting information.

In addition to revolutionising the applicant workflow and internal processes associated, NZQA have now deployed the Power Platform into the wider team and business units. Utilising out of the box features, they have found efficiencies across the organisation and have been able to provide a better experience for their applicants but also for their internal stakeholders.