Case Study:                 Market Channel Development Project

The Task

The Department of Labor was looking for an innovative strategy to become more integrated with institutions of higher education. They were looking for ways to be part of these institutions daily and operational lives. They were also interested in providing seamless ways of exchanging course offering data with these schools.

The Client

The U.S. Department of Labor, America's Learning eXchange (ALX) is a national online college course catalog resource for students and people interested in continuing education.

The Situation

Our strategic planning resulted in the identification of common software providers to these institutions, known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors. By having functionality connected into ALX included in the ERP software, course offering information could be shared with the push of a button. This also allowed the strength of the ERP marketing effort to include messages from ALX.

The Action

The challenge was to convince the ERP vendors of the business case for them to invest their development resources into developing this software functionality. We were successful in doing this and managed the technical development effort between the Department of Labor and the ERP. We also managed the beta testing and release efforts of this feature set.

The Results

This project concluded successfully with the promotional release of the new version of ERP code to their customer base. ALX benefited through this effort by having the needed connection into higher education and having the automated links to the course offering materials to many higher education institutions.