Certification system
a global network of beauty trainers & students
Generating digital certificates for graduates in the beauty industry, facilitating international shippings, managing live or online trainings, leveraging a credits system, accreditations and a public world map of community members. An all-in-one ERP system for educational activities.
Industry
Timeline
Every project has a purpose...
“Take a process facilitated by 22 Excel documents & numerous manual activities and digitalise it, in order to reduce the burden of 8 - 10 people in the team and increase the speed of delivery to their tens of thousands of members worldwide.”
That’s how the idea for this certification system started. From just one use case, on top of which we added one more… and one other, and one other. For 4 years.
Before 2020, when we launched the system, the education team of this beauty industry leader had been engaged in manually maintaining its growing audience of 50.000 members. For every new student graduating, they had to add their data into multiple documents. For every change in the community, they had to keep in sync different sources. The time lost with manual operations was an issue, bringing with it data consistency & reliability risks.
We took on the challenge and created an education management system that completely revamped how the company was growing its audience.
...which requires a unique approach.
Soon after understanding the business problem and engaging in product discovery, we’ve started the work. Shaping up features, building design elements & handling the implementation.
We’ve architected the system based on tailored business needs, with growth in mind. Every database column, backend method or application component was built to allow future expansion and to require minimum refactoring.
Over time, we had built a platform able to:
generate PDF certificates for more than 75 techniques, 3 categories and 2 types
showcase the educational path of any given student, from the first touchpoint to the latest milestone
support instructors when planning trainings and admins while reviewing or approving them
publicly display accredited members in a world wide map, accounting for individual user consent
act as a source of truth for the entire educational dataset & process
provide key stakeholders with internal industry insights
handle & track license credits, similar to a banking ledger
We’ve deployed the application live, in it’s first production version, in April 2020. Since then, it has been constantly growing.
One key concept we doubled down on was reliability & scalability: if the product team would have to stop at any given moment, the application would continue to function in a sustainable way. No risky bugs, no performance issues and zero hardcoded elements that could’ve caused troubles, bringing in the end little-to-none vendor lock-in. We did grow the project over time, rather from a strategic drive instead.
This was an application built solely for one client, a leader in the beauty industry. Built on a B2B2C model, it had a large amount of touchpoints with end customers and supported various internal teams, from education, community, marketing, logistics or customer support all the way to other vendors of the organisation.
Key metrics
- from idea to live release
- 9 months
- attendance certificates
- 108.000+
- graduation certificates
- 76.000+
- trainers
- 900+
Achievements
-
Drove discovery & roadmap through multiple product stages.
product -
Led the product with hands-on experience: from writing the first line of code to building a team of 6.
leadership -
Became the active point of contact with key stakeholders.
growth -
Coordinated various internal or vendor teams.
strategic -
Lead the integration with five 1st party and three 3rd party systems
code -
Initiated & lead a full UX audit, supported by a key researcher.
product -
Led the redesign of the application to a new UI after 3 years of continuous learnings.
product -
Facilitated multiple product showcases in public or remove for new features.
growth -
Migrated thousands of data points retroactively from the 2015 - 2020 period.
code -
The project started from Laravel v5.6, maintained in time all the way to Laravel v10.
code
The map showcasing all members worldwide
The listing of attendance certificates
Browsing the system configuration
The next functions got packed into one tool
2 apps under the same hood
live & online trainings
attendance & graduation certificates
community map for members
accreditations management
ledger-based credits system
insights module
notifications & announcements
source of truth in the ecosystem
internal knowledge base
public FAQs & tooltips
permissions-based access control
...and the technologies that enabled it
Laravel
Vue
Tailwind
Bootstrap
jQuery
AWS
Github
Sentry
Mailchimp
Klavyio
Adobe Creative Cloud
Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics
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Visit projectTalking legal
In order to comply with the European compliance regulations and a high data protection component required for enterprises, we have conducted or engaged the tool, together with our legal partners, in several data privacy & protection activities.
Cookies
Coordinated and implemented the cookie consent management, kept under active maintenance together with the cookie policy.
Policies
Created and performed ongoing adjustments of relevant documentation, such as the terms & conditions and privacy policy.
DPIA
Coordinated, with support from IT & privacy law specialists, a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) for the project, as part of ongoing GDPR compliance steps at the organisational level.
Audit
Engaged in legal assessments, with support from law specialists, for every solution or service vendors before taking the decision of collaboration or integration.
Notes
The mockups and information showcased on this page have been anonymised in order to serve a purely presentational purpose, safeguarding relevant customer data, personal information or business insights.
This SaaS tool and all related customer projects have been implemented during my employment with Sourcing International.