Streamlining Student Engagement: Accelerating Salesforce Education Cloud Rollout by 95% with BuildVia.ai
Client Overview:
A large, multi-campus university, serving tens of thousands of students across undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs, faced the challenge of providing a unified and highly personalized experience for its diverse student body. They relied on Salesforce Education Cloud to manage student admissions, recruitment, academic advising, student services, and alumni relations. With a strategic goal to enhance student engagement and operational efficiency, the university sought a rapid and scalable approach to implement and customize their Education Cloud instance.
Challenges:
The university encountered several significant hurdles in its traditional approach to Salesforce Education Cloud implementation and ongoing development:
Lengthy Implementation for Student Lifecycle Management: Customizing Education Cloud for specific departmental needs—such as unique admissions processes for different faculties, complex academic advising workflows, or tailored student support services—typically took 3-5 months per major initiative. This protracted timeline meant the university struggled to keep pace with evolving student expectations and competitive pressures.
Resource-Intensive Manual Configuration: A considerable amount of effort was spent on manual configuration of objects (e.g., Program Enrollments, Courses), custom fields, workflows, and integrations with legacy student information systems (SIS) and learning management systems (LMS). This required substantial allocation of IT staff and external consultants, leading to high costs and internal resource strain.
Risk of Data Silos and Inconsistencies: Manual data migration from various legacy systems (admissions databases, alumni records, student health services) into Education Cloud was prone to errors, leading to data inconsistencies and fragmented student profiles. This impacted the university’s ability to gain a holistic view of each student.
Scalability Challenges for New Programs and Enrollments: As the university introduced new academic programs, expanded online learning offerings, or saw increases in student enrollment, scaling their Education Cloud environment through traditional development cycles became a bottleneck, impeding growth and responsiveness.
Difficulty Adapting to Evolving Educational Models: The higher education landscape is rapidly changing with new pedagogical approaches, hybrid learning models, and increasing demands for personalized student support. Slow development cycles made it difficult for the university to quickly adapt its Salesforce environment to support these innovations.
Solutions Implemented:
The university partnered with BuildVia.ai to transform its Salesforce Education Cloud deployment using an AI-first strategy. The implementation focused on leveraging BuildVia.ai across the entire project lifecycle for several key initiatives, including a major overhaul of their student admissions and advising portals:
AI-Powered Requirements Analysis: BuildVia.ai’s Smart Document Analysis AI ingested detailed university policy documents, academic program descriptions, existing student journey maps, and user stories from admissions, advising, and student support departments. Within hours, it generated a precise, validated blueprint for the Education Cloud solution, including specific data models for student records, application processes, and course catalogs.
Intelligent Architecture Design: The platform’s Intelligent Architecture AI then took this blueprint and instantly designed an optimized Education Cloud structure. This included configuring standard and custom objects (e.g., Applications, Milestones, Course Offerings), defining relationships, and outlining secure integration points with the university’s existing SIS, LMS, and financial aid systems.
Automated Code Generation: This capability proved invaluable for creating highly customized student and faculty portals. BuildVia.ai’s Code Generation AI automatically wrote hundreds of components, including Apex triggers for automated admissions workflows, Lightning Web Components for personalized student dashboards, and intricate data synchronization logic, drastically reducing manual coding efforts.
Comprehensive Automated Testing: BuildVia.ai automatically generated comprehensive test suites tailored for Education Cloud, including tests for admissions process integrity, academic advising workflows, student data privacy, and integration with external systems. Thousands of test cases were executed in minutes, dramatically reducing quality assurance time and ensuring data accuracy.
One-Click Deployment: Once thoroughly tested and approved, BuildVia.ai facilitated a seamless, one-click deployment to the university’s production Education Cloud environment, minimizing disruption and ensuring immediate availability of new functionalities for students and staff.
Impacts:
The integration of BuildVia.ai had a profound impact on the university’s Salesforce Education Cloud operations:
Rapid Delivery of Student-Centric Services: The most significant impact was the dramatic reduction in deployment timelines. Complex Education Cloud projects that previously took many months were now completed in just days. This enabled the university to rapidly launch new student admission portals, enhance academic advising tools, and introduce personalized student support programs with unprecedented speed.
Significant Cost Efficiency: By automating over 95% of the manual configuration and coding, the university achieved substantial savings in development, testing, and consulting costs. This allowed them to reallocate budget to critical educational programs and student support initiatives.
Enhanced Data Consistency and Accuracy: The AI-driven approach significantly reduced human errors in data migration and configuration, leading to higher-quality, more reliable Education Cloud deployments. Automated validation improved data integrity across the student lifecycle.
Improved Agility for Academic and Program Growth: The university gained the ability to rapidly scale their Education Cloud to support new academic programs, online course offerings, and strategic enrollment initiatives, fostering greater organizational agility in a competitive educational landscape.
Optimized IT and Administrative Resources: The in-house IT and administrative teams could re-focus from tedious development and testing tasks to more strategic initiatives, such as refining student journeys, optimizing advising workflows, and exploring new digital learning innovations.
Results:
10x Faster Implementation: Salesforce Education Cloud deployments were accelerated by a factor of 10, transforming multi-month projects into a matter of days.
95% AI Automation: Manual effort was virtually eliminated across development, configuration, testing, and deployment, handled almost entirely by AI.
Reduced Development and Integration Costs by 68%: Significant savings were realized through reduced human resource allocation and faster project completion, particularly for complex integrations with legacy SIS/LMS.
93% Reduction in Post-Deployment Errors: Automated testing and intelligent code generation drastically improved the quality and stability of deployed Education Cloud solutions, ensuring high data integrity.
Accelerated Launch of New Student Portals by 85%: New or enhanced student admission and advising portals could be launched much quicker, directly impacting student recruitment and retention.
