Higher Education Case Study

The university is a large and complex higher education institution supporting approximately 57,000 students and more than 7,000 staff. Its direct application process relied on a bespoke front-end used by applicants and student agents, integrated with an Oracle-based student management platform that managed progression from application through approval and enrolment. As the university transitioned to a commercial cloud platform, all in-flight applications needed to be migrated in their current state while preserving application status, progress and data quality. The migration therefore had to account for complex field structures, dependencies, conditions and business rules across the existing and replacement environments.

Evinact profiled source-system data and mapped fields from the existing platform to the replacement system, working closely with the university’s admissions and technical teams and the platform vendor. The discovery and mapping process identified the conditions and business rules required to determine the correct treatment of each application.

Evinact translated these rules into a repeatable extraction and transformation process using Azure Data Factory and SQL stored procedures, producing more than 20 import files for loading, validation and ingestion into the target platform. Multiple dress rehearsals were then conducted and refined to test the end-to-end migration process and confirm that application records would transfer accurately and consistently.

More than 50,000 in-flight student applications were migrated accurately and seamlessly to the new cloud platform, preserving application status, progress and data quality while maintaining continuity of the admissions process.

The thoroughly documented and tested migration approach reduced transition risk and gave university executives and delivery stakeholders confidence in the integrity and reliability of the migration.