Case Study

SaaS-based VMS Solution Ensures Student Safety Across 15,000 K-12 Schools in the US

Education
Product Engineering

The VMS application that Trigent built was convenient and information-rich. The team was organized and dedicated throughout the project.

About the Client​

The organization pioneered the digital student safety movement in 2012 and continues to innovate by offering end-to-end student safety and mobile device management solutions for K-12. The organization’s cloud-based SaaS products work to improve student safety, wellness, and engagement by providing a holistic and unified platform engaging teachers, students, and parents. Headquartered in California, the organization’s cutting-edge technologies, combined with 24/7 support from trained safety experts, cater to more than 15,000 schools across the US.

Business Needs​

According to studies, 80% of educational institutions use manual systems and processes to regulate visitor access to school facilities. The error-prone manual approach compromises the safety and security of the students. The organization recognized the need to empower the school administration with technology and tools that are reliable and assure safety.
With the aim of creating safe learning environments for students, they set out to develop a technology-based solution to assure student security. The solution needed to integrate with other systems, such as the School Management Software (SMS) and external third-party databases, for effective and efficient operations.
Companies are more likely to invest in AI-led technology to optimize business processes cost-effectively, offering lucrative opportunities in the human resource technology market. Additionally, strengthening an organization’s defense against security is a good investment, specifically for small and medium-sized organizations.

Business Challenge​

The organization opted for a ground-up approach to re-imagine the entire visitor check-in process adopted by schools. With student and staff safety at the center and as a front line of defense, the solution needed to:
  • Manage visitor access privileges of students
  • Identify and authenticate visitor sign-in
  • Leverage facial recognition and digital verification visitors
  • Limit visitor access to authorized areas of the school facilities
  • Provide alerts on suspicious visitors to parents & admin
For the concept to come to fruition, data structures needed to be standardized, and APIs needed to be implemented to share data between several components. Moreover, special focus had to be given to designing the user experience while integrating the various product flows in a single application. The organization sought a team of experts to help them translate their idea into a functional proof of concept with minimum disruption to their ongoing business initiatives.

Empower your school's IT administration with cutting-edge technology and tools that are reliable and assure student and staff safety

Trigent Solution

The organization decided to develop a Visitor Management System (VMS) application from scratch and take a leadership position in the industry. The solution warranted using technical and product management competencies such as Market Study and Research, Business Analysis, DevOps, Application Development, Quality Engineering, scalable Cloud infrastructure, and ongoing Operations. This was the primary reason for the organization to select Trigent as its partner.

Trigent’s Service Enabler - Trigent AXLR8 Labs

The organization partnered with Trigent to leverage Trigent AXLR8 Labs. The flexible team structure for the project enabled the client to develop a best-in-class VMS application for students and school admins alike. As the project progressed, Trigent’s unique engagement model enabled the organization to scale up critical resources when required and ramp down upon completion in the following stages:

Ideate

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Trigent initiated an intense two-week requirement-gathering effort. The ideation phase included discussions with key stakeholders within the business and also the end-user community. Surveys and rigorous interviews with the end users helped document the business flow. Extensive market research of competing products in the market and their features helped the organization identify existing gaps and design a solution that would address the current lacuna and new features that the end users demanded. A product manager led this phase from Trigent along with the organization’s CEO to ensure a well-rounded assessment of the business requirements.

Create

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With the insights gathered from the ideation phase, Trigent’s product studio designed and developed an MVP of the VMS application within just five months. AXLR8 Labs’ Ninja Team designed the application using microservices, containerized, and cloud-native architecture for scale and reliability. A secure and scalable API framework was defined to allow easy integration with third-party applications, to ensure rapid onboarding of new schools with minimal effort.​

Validate

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Leveraging Trigent’s capabilities in Product engineering, the team developed a ground-up VMS application. The application development team worked with the in-house Engineers in developing an end-to-end bespoke solution that was automated, well-integrated, and seamless solution. The product development was a highly agile and iterative process. Several prototypes were built for feedback and generating product user stories that provided the organization with an idea of the custom solution. Prior to further enhancements, the product was ready for the release.

Iterate:

The product development was a highly agile and iterative process. The ninja team enhanced the MVP to scale the business.
The robust application streamlined, automated, and simplified the entire visitor-check-in process by providing a connected digital experience in the following areas:

  • Background screenings
  • Student pick-up
  • Silent alerts (for suspicious entries)
  • Guest badges
  • Health screenings, others

For ease of configuration and scalability, the application was built on cloud-native architecture on Microsoft Azure.

The software architecture was built on the PHP framework, and tools such as HTML5 and CSS4 were leveraged as the UI Layer. The team also built a database leveraging MySQL wherein all the data captured with regard to adult check-ins through background screenings, facial recognition, and driver’s license scan, to name a few, were stored.

Accelerate

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The team adhered to several industry benchmarks such as OWASP and CIS (Center for Internet Security) for security standards.
Conscious technical decisions were made early on to ensure that the application was built to scale on Azure as IaaS. With loosely coupled Azure components at play, deployment was seamless. Automation enabled the DevOps teams to monitor a self-scalable autonomous deployment as the load increased on the system.
Additionally, the team integrated several disparate systems, such as background checks and facial recognition, to improve efficiency, transparency, and security . The seamless integration ensured continuous scalability and performance as well as increased agility and reliability, thereby reducing uncertainty and risk. Trigent’s QE resources were aligned with the development sprints for shift left testing to ensure bugs were trapped early, and performance roadblocks were pre-emptively handled.

Operate

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Trigent team was able to actively monitor application & service usage on Azure and proactively take steps to ensure the infrastructure spending was under control and met with the business demands.

Given its importance, the application is constantly monitored and tested to prevent bugs and downtime. Unit, smoke, and compatibility testing are performed to analyze defect leakage and test case pass percentage, among others. APIs are also constantly tested, leveraging Postman. Static code analysis & periodic Pen Tests are used to ensure the application was free of any vulnerabilities.

Client Benefits

Leveraging Trigent’s AXLR8 Labs, the organization was able to develop a cutting-edge VMS application that not only provided a risk-free learning environment for students in more than 15,000 schools across the US but also:

  • Improved digital efficiency at schools
  • Attained a fully customizable workflow
  • Established a WOW first impression for visitors
  • Reduced operations cost
  • Ensured peace of mind and security of over 10M students
  • Earned an approval rating of 85%

Technology Stack

php
Microsoft Azure
Bootstrap
Angular
Html5
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