DDLS project transforms experience for IT training customers

When your business is all about upskilling people in IT and keeping those skills up to date, it’s vital that your own systems are performing at their best.

DDLS is Australia’s largest provider of corporate IT and process training, with over 700 courses across 12 categories. The company has over 30 years’ expertise in the training market and is recognised as the Australian partner of choice by Microsoft, Google, AWS, Cisco and many more.

DDLS has also recently purchased Auldhouse, New Zealand’s largest digital skills training business, which will add another 10,000 customers annually to its already in-demand services. The three additional Kiwi sites will bring the number of campuses to a total of 10 across Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, with around 150 staff and over AU$50 million in revenue.

DDLS is a vital part of the digitisation of the Asia-Pacific economy. They operate in an extremely fast-growing industry, as the demand for IT skills continues to gather pace – both Australia and New Zealand report major skills shortages in technology and IT. Because DDLS promises to help its customers stay ahead of the technology curve, it’s particularly important that the business itself is operating at the forefront of the sector.

The DDLS team chose to work with Datacom on what became a significant platform upgrade; teams from both organisations collaborated to find a scalable and cost-effective solution that would meet DDLS’s unique business requirements.

DDLS wanted not only to invest in improved productivity internally, but also in a better experience for their customers. They moved to a new cloud-based platform: Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Business Central. By switching to Dynamics 365, DDLS has been able to get more support from Microsoft and move every part of their operations online. This has not only been an immediate improvement operationally, but it’s also allowed DDLS to make the most of some of the additional products that integrate with Dynamics 365.

“We knew that by moving to 365, we would have the opportunity to use other 365 platforms like Power Automate – and having them all hosted by Microsoft means no more server upgrades or hardware upgrades,” says James Davidson, ICT Manager. “This has completely removed the requirement for server hardware and access controls on site.”

The range of products now available to the teams at DDLS has quickly led to better communication between departments.

“Our marketing team’s platform now talks to our CRM database, which would have been next to impossible before. All the departments were involved in the process of moving to 365 and everyone has benefitted from it – from the little things like secure remote access all the way to automation and visibility,” says James. “We are absolutely more productive.”

One of the most obvious improvements is the improved customer service portal. It allows DDLS customers to access their information, book online courses and enter their own details. This has removed a two-step data entry process where DDLS received emails from customers and entered details into their systems manually.

“This is digital transformation for our customer portal,” James says. “Every department sees a huge amount of time saving and customer satisfaction should also increase.”

Learning just how much their new platform can do has been a major upside of the project, he adds.

Under the legacy system, the team was constrained by a lack of ability to modify and customise their own systems, “which was a big frustration operationally".

"We see so much we can do internally now – it’s a big positive.”