Case Study: PSESD Streamlines Reporting to Discover New Service Opportunities

Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD) is one of nine regional educational agencies serving school districts and state approved charter and private schools in Washington. Created by the legislature, Educational Service Districts are an essential regional delivery system for early learning and K-postsecondary services in the state. 

PSESD is committed to becoming an Antiracist Multicultural Organization. Each PSESD employee supports our regional educational communities. We hold each other accountable to sustaining the Principles That Guide Our Culture to meet the Agency End: Success for each child and eliminate the opportunity gap by leading with racial equity.

psesd.org

ESDs improve the quality, equity, and efficiency of educational programs through partnerships with K-12 education, early learning, higher education, and public and private organizations.

Business Challenges

PSESD’s clients are school districts that work with populations that are highly mobile, fast growing, and have a diverse array of needs. This dynamic landscape creates a demand for services that frequently change—sometimes even on a weekly basis. PSESD implemented Salesforce in the hope that it would help them manage their workflow, improve data collection, and streamline their reporting process. However, their Salesforce architecture needed to be heavily adapted, requiring technical skills that fell outside of their capacity. 

PSESD partnered with EightCloud to provide the technical and strategic expertise needed to customize Salesforce to keep abreast of their clients’ constantly changing service requirements. Since PSESD does not have any developers on staff, the solution also needed to be simple enough to maintain on their own with minimal coding.

---

The managed services agreement relationship with EightCloud has been the single most meaningful and impactful aspect of the services we received for this project. Having access to a dedicated account specialist to provide technical and business process solutions has been invaluable. The specialist identified business process improvements, provided Salesforce training, and served as an interpreter between multiple developers and our end users. 

EightCloud freed us to focus on our work instead of attempting to create technical solutions that are beyond our in-house capacity. Ultimately, the exceptional services provided by EightCloud gave us the tools we needed to improve the services we provide to our clients.

– Anna Wade, Director, Grants Administration, PSESD

---

What We Did

• Interviewed key stakeholders to gain an in-depth understanding of their organizational needs.
• Conducted a thorough assessment of PSESD’s workflow needs and provided critical guidance for refining their internal business processes for maximum productivity.
• Created a product development roadmap that established priorities for new development projects.
• Modified their Salesforce architecture to align with PSESD’s workflow and support Conga document output.
• Trained their Salesforce administrators and end users on how to use and modify the Lightning interface to suit their individual needs.

Key projects completed by EightCloud: 

• Created custom internal dashboards that provided PSESD with filterable views and high-level rollups of the services provided to their clients.
• Created templated documents using Salesforce Conga to streamline the reporting process. The customized reports matched PSESD’s existing branding and reporting formats, creating a seamless experience for their clients. 

Results

• Dramatically streamlined the report generation process, boosting marketing capacity. PSESD replaced a labor intensive, paper-based process with custom Salesforce dashboards that collate real-time data from 100+ programs. This reduced the amount of time and effort required to create individualized client reports from days and weeks to minutes.

• Provided new opportunities for improved enhancements to service delivery, marketing and adoption, and improving student outcomes. PSESD employees now have easy access to a wealth of data points. This will strengthen their ability to establish key metrics and make informed recommendations to their clients.
• Increased employee buy-in and adoption of the updated Salesforce platform. eightCloud customized Salesforce to better align with PSESD’s workflow. The migration to Lightning’s user-friendly interface, combined with eightCloud’s hands-on Salesforce training, helped generate excitement and enthusiasm among PSESD employees, incentivizing them to learn how to use Salesforce to better serve their audiences.

DOWNLOAD PDF