SIM transforms digitally to empower today’s workforce with new skills

SIM (Singapore Institute of Management) was established in 1964 to equip individuals and businesses with the skills needed to further the country’s economic growth. Since then, SIM has become one of Singapore’s leading private education providers, offering programs for students as well as adult learners.

As a not-for-profit, SIM aims to do good by doing well, and channels revenue from its programs into initiatives that address inequality and support the disadvantaged to advance socially and economically. The organisation is also focused on helping workers counter digital disruption.

Seong Kim Ho, Chief Digital Solutions, Platform & Infrastructure Officer at SIM, shared that it was these issues, and Singapore’s ageing population, that have led SIM to transform and direct more of its focus to supporting adult learners.

“We have a massive workforce being disrupted by technology. We needed a new way to help individuals and businesses pivot their skillset and to take that learning into the digital realm,” said Seong Kim.

With the help of Salesforce technology and Professional Services, SIM is on its way to achieving this goal with the launch of a new platform to digitise the end-to-end learner journey and course administration for individuals and corporates. This includes processes for self-registration, course feedback, course scheduling, refund and deferral management, and more.

In going digital, SIM wanted to do more than simply lift and shift its courses online. It wanted to provide a tailored solution for online learning, backed by a platform to manage engagement with learners and business customers. Influenced by the success of one of its university partners, SIM chose to transform using Salesforce.

“The advantage of Salesforce is that it’s a complete end-to-end solution. We can manage sales, marketing, registration and more, all from one platform,” said Seong Kim.

Salesforce Professional Services was brought in to architect the solution and ensure the right foundation for all that SIM wanted to achieve. Seong Kim explained that with so many capabilities offered by Salesforce and the AppExchange, the team wanted guidance in choosing the right ones.

“Salesforce Professional Services was best positioned to guide us in making the right architectural decisions and building things in a way that would help us to scale,” said Seong Kim.

Phase one of SIM’s transformation is now complete. Leading with a human-centred design approach, Salesforce ran workshops with SIM to define the ideal journeys for users as well as the organisation’s admin team. Together, they identified requirements to create a digital hub with a seamless user experience that would serve a full range of learner needs, from browsing course content and reading reviews to submitting payments and streaming live classes.

These requirements informed decisions on how to architect the solution and led to the integration of multiple back-end systems, streamlining the end-to-end experience for both learners and administrators.

“It was a very collaborative implementation, with Professional Services taking our team from almost zero knowledge about Salesforce to a level where we can run things by ourselves. We can also educate our users on what’s possible with the platform moving forward,” said Seong Kim.

Delivered in just 18 weeks, the new digital solution includes a portal built on Experience Cloud where learners can browse and register for more than 100 courses. It leverages Salesforce Platform for the automation of processes.

Service Cloud has also been implemented to support efficient case management and provide students with answers to frequently asked questions.

MuleSoft is another key element of the solution and enables integration with various Learning Management Systems so learners can access courses using single sign-on. MulesSoft also enables integration with SIM’s payment gateway and other financial systems. In the future, it will support synchronisation between Salesforce and a third-party content management system. It will also enable SIM to interface with government grant and funding systems.

The future use of Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud will give SIM the data and capabilities to better engage with learners and businesses. For example, SIM will be able to offer businesses courses that are more tailored to the needs of their workers. It will also be able to market relevant adult learning courses to university students on its campuses.

In the six months since going live with its digital solution, SIM has received 1,300 course registrations. Seong Kim is excited about the potential growth, but equally positive about what the organisation has already achieved.

“The value so far is the foundational capability on which we can grow our digital offering,” Seong Kim. “We had nothing before and now— in less than five months—we have a solid foundation we can continue to build on.”