Digital Transformation of Swim Coaches and Teachers Australia

Webinar Transcript

 Welcome everyone to this month's webinar for dita Solutions. This month what we're talking about is Asher's digital transformation journey. Happy that everyone could be here with us. Got a little bit to go through today, so I'll jump straight in and and let's get started. So yeah.

What's today about, today's about SCTA's Digital Transformation journey? SCTA partnered with dita Solutions in 2017 to execute their digital transformation. The mission was to design an enterprise-wide, fully automated training and development product that transforms the organization's end-to-end processes.

Let's get started. My name's Ben Pedrazzini. dita Solutions join forces with world renowned Olympic gold medallist from Coach Laurie Lawrence. After a successful career as water safety advocate and sought after motivational speaker Laurie teamed with myself and a fellow entrepreneur Steven White from the Nine Network IT to establish data solutions.

So data solutions quickly became making workplace safer for employees and has now grown into a range of business automation workflows. That's a little bit about me. Let's talk about what digital transformation is. Firstly, it's all in our name, dita, so it's digital integration, transformation, and automation.

This topic is really exciting for us. dita Solutions started as a SaaS based LMS and over the past decade we've focused on solving problem. For our clients through this journey, and we've helped develop a platform that is about digital transformation. So digital transformation is much more than just installing online platforms in a business.

It requires a number of steps that is really about developing new. Automated business processes. So in to do that, there's a couple of steps that you have to go through. So first step is for a business to understand its current business processes. And how you're being, how they're being managed. This is part that we thrive in.

As dita, we can sit down with your team and have a look at what you're currently doing and see how that maps. The second step is to identify if there are new goals, wish, which you wish to achieve for your business. And then the third step is that we map these new workflows and then work out how to automate these through digital transformation.

So with the dita platform, we've got a lot of different solutions that's available to help with this. So we've got data learning, which is an automated onboarding, learning pathways and compliance system. There are literally thousands of ways. We can com customize this for your organization. We've got deed documents, and this is a major part of every organization's compliance to the legislative and regulatory requirements.

dita forms. So unlike any other form system, the data forms is the connector between all the parts of our platform business processes and to your customers and to your clients. So it connects all those parts of the system and connects you to them, a dita contractor. So today, more than ever, you're responsible for your contractors that supply services to your business as part of your offering.

Just as much as you are with your staff. So that's an important part to, to be automated. And then dita visitor, and that's all about understanding who you're responsible for at your place of work in your businesses about tracking who they are and when they're on site and what you need to know about them.

Now, just a little bit of background now about the dita and SCTA. The relationship with SCTA and Swim Australia has been in instrumental in the development of the dita platform. As I said before, we started in 2017.

They're our first association and we couldn't have asked for a better organization to go on this journey with for many years. We approached them with different offering. But it wasn't until there was a change of management that we had a breakthrough. I still remember the first day when I met the CEO, Brendan Ward.

It was in his first couple of weeks here, and we met in our office in Ang, Brendan pulled out our last proposal at an agreement that we had given to SCTA and said, this is important. Let's get going. We knew that we had a number of the members from the team. Already knew what the benefits were. They understood the vision and it, and understood where we were coming from.

But it wasn't until the understanding came from the top that we were able to start engaging in the process. So that was the big turning point for us and working in that special team with Brendan, that we've worked a long time. Was Sally, so Sally is our special guest today. And just a little bit about Sally.

So obviously just a little bit more about, firstly about Swim Australia and and the Australian Swimming Coach and Teach Association. They're both peak bodies for coaches, teachers swim schools in Australia. Swim Australia is dedicated to developing the world, leading practices in education, accreditation, professional development and ongoing support for swimming coaches and swimming and water safety teachers. So as well as developing and empowering swimming school networks through the delivery of the world's best practices, guidelines, professional development. They're building programs and growth opportunities for businesses through support.

They've got a great range of products. So let's get in and let's get to know who SCTA is. What I'm going to do next up is we're going to bring Sally in. I recorded with Sally earlier in an interview, and we're going to just step through getting to know Asher a little bit more and that'll help you understand what the process we went through with going through the digital transformation.

Tell us about SCTA and what you do.

The Australian Swim Coaches and Teachers Association and Swim Australia are the peak bodies for swim coaches, teachers and swim skills in Australia. So we work in the space of education, accreditation, professional development, and ongoing support for swimming coaches and swimming and water safety teachers nationally and internationally, as well as develop and empower our swim school network. So my role as general manager operations is to ensure that SCTA is sustainable and effective by ensuring that our strategies, policies, and procedures are productive and profitable. 

As we are a member organization as well as an R T O, my priorities. Include ensuring we create a student-centric learning platform, which also guarantees compliance with the standards, whilst also providing an opportunity for scalability for our organization. So it's a big scope but I love the opportunity of providing great education and professional development for swim teachers and coaches nationally and internationally. 

Thanks, Sally. What was the problem or key challenges you were looking to solve when you approached this? Look, technology was moving really fast and we were very outdated.

Our theory for our courses for on CDs and students were finding it increasingly difficult to access C direct D CD drives to complete them. So this was making our courses undesirable, very frustrating, and consequently we're receiving lots and lots of. We needed to act fast to find an LMS that was able to bring us into the online learning world. So that's why we approached dita solutions.

How are these problems affecting your business?

Look, the old system of sending CDs to students created a multitude of problems from CDs not working to students, not being able to use them. And they were also able to be shared. So we were really unaware of where these CDs were end, our knowledge was ending up. This was affecting all areas of our business, especially the bottom line. So we had to make changes and make changes fast.

Okay. This next section we're just going to talk a little bit about partnering with dita Solutions so we're going to find out more from SCTA's partnership with dita and how it's transformed their organization.

What made you choose to partner with dita to solve these challenges?

Look, we had organizational connections with dita and had watched the rapid and successful growth that dita Solutions had made over the previous few years, so we could see that the products that dita were creating would be absolutely perfect for us. We knew that this was the way forward and that would enable us to grow and thrive.

dita Solutions implemented four key parts of the system to help improve these challenges. The dita forms, dita learning, dita events, along with Stripe payment integration. How has each element worked to streamline your overall process? 

Look, all four. Parts of the system have worked tremendously for us. dita forms has provided a benefit by dramatically reducing paperwork within the office. All student forms used to be mailed in and mailed out, creating a massive manual handling. Process. And a really big loss of document issue. So dita Forms has completely eliminated this issue with students completing all forms online.

No loss of documents. We can see at all times exactly where students are up to with their forms. We've been able to remove all the filing cabinets out of our, and storage out of our. And have saved a fortune in postage and staff costs. In the manual handling of all of that. dita learning has enabled us to quickly go online and also provided the opportunity to upscale dramatically. We began this project way before covid hit, and we never really realized how essential the online world was going to become. 

dita Learning enabled us to continue to provide learning while the world was in lockdown and we're able to provide our members continued engagement and learning opportunities. This has been essential for us. dita events has been a game changer for us and our presenters. Organizing courses and events used to be really labour intensive. And time consuming. The process for all involved was really laborious. Our presenters can now apply to run an event and have it approved and promoted all within a few hours.

So we've got courses going up on the calendar continuously now. And we can act really fast and presenters who need to run a course urgently can contact us and we can have it going within 24. So bringing on the Stripe platform the payment platform has been really essential. It's streamlined the payment process for the students, the presenters, and ourselves. Cash flow has improved markedly, and tracking of payments is much simpler for all involved. So all four elements were essential for us, and it's been terrific.

Okay, thanks for Sally. Look what I just I'll just recap on that a little bit and there's about our solutions. So there's four solutions there, including the Stripe payment Gateway, which we do an integration with from our platform, which makes all the payment processes work seamlessly within our solution as well.

But I'll just go through the solutions that we work that are part of the dita platform. We work with SCTA to understand what their current workflows were and the bottlenecks, the next couple of screens. I'm gonna step you through that one one part of the time. And knowing these bottlenecks, we were able to physic and where the physical aspects of the process were.

We were able to build bespoke solutions within the dita platform. So the three main parts we worked. Ask for this process were the data forms and, that was about transforming the enrollment requirements for both the students and the presenters. We automated to be online forms that captured the information automatically.

No more paperwork, no more faxing or mailing them in. Losing paperwork, et cetera. And we built automated workflows within the system that directs the information to the right people in SCTA so the right people in their office were getting the information. As soon as it's being submitted. And it also allows for approval and to reassign the form back to the submitter for additional information.

Very difficult when people are sending in hard copies of things to then be going backwards and forwards with them. But with dita forms we've got simple processes there where you can select a button to send the form back and send a message back to the student or the client. And with that message you can ask them to give you more information or change information if it's needs be.

So that's the forms and that's a really important part of collecting information. And compliance. The second part was the events themselves. It's about tracking those face-to-face physical events that are part of a course. And so what we did through the presenters they submit that they wanted to create an event.

And that's done through a form. And what would happen once that electronic form was sent to an assessor someone that approved the events with inside of the SCTA administrative team, then our system would automatically create the event in the data platform. And once that had happened, then a, a new email would be sent out to the presenter.

And in that email it would. A information about the event. And it would also have a link that the presenter could then promote to their students. And this is what would be put up on the calendar for the SCTA team. And that would already, that link would already be connected automatically to our Stripe payment system so that it could collect and process the payments of the students.

And those payments can be split out automatically. As they're needed to between the presenters and the organization, et cetera. So automatically stores registration details and provides a cloud-based reporting for the presenters to mark and report on the attendances. All of those processes are taken in, in, into account in the event system.

And then, then there's the traditional dita learning. And so what we did there was we looked at their CD ROMs that they were using for training. They had handbooks first, and then they had CD ROMs. And we transferred all that content into our learner management system to dita learning.

So we created interactive training material, which included video. Just normal HTML pages, quizzes and assessments that would automatically do a lot of the marking along the way in that process. And with that, the training can be as accessed anywhere and at any time after the enrollment. So there's no need for them to wait for items to be posted out or delivered.

Students can get. Started immediately. So one of the benefits of that is I guess a student can enroll like a day or two before an event actually starts a physical workshop and they can get through the the information and training in the lead up, during and after. And so they can so move very quickly with getting their accreditations.

I'm going to just break down, there's two different parts to the process here and there's a presenter process. So we work with with SCTA and with Sally very closely on this, is looking at all the different processes that were. In the pathway and what we had to automate. So two main parts is the presenters, and then the second part was for the students, so their workflow.

And you can see here I've split this out into three sections before the event, during the event, and after the event. So that's after the face-to-face workshops. Let's look at the first part. So the first part is, To complete a course application form. So the presenter themselves can at any time just log into their dashboard and they can start a form, an application form, online application form to create a course.

And they would fill that form out and and then they'd send it in. To to dita for approval or for to ask her for approval. And then once they do that, then they can promote their workshop straight away once they've been approved for that application. And then once that's received, also there's another email that would go off and allows the ASK administration team to understand.

Course kits are required to be sent out and and those kits are then received for before the event starts. And then they have, they can have access to the student enrollment. So all through the process leading up to the event where students can automatically book in online through the links, they get notification of when the student books in, and they also have access to the student's profile and also to their enrollment form so they can understand some of the important information about the student that they're meant to know.

Before they turn up on the day, like including their age including the, if there's any language barriers et cetera. So there's a lot of information that's collected on that, but they have access to all of that prior to the day of the event so they can look after the student better. And then we have the ability to print out.

So if they don't want to take a digital device, on site, because this, in their instance this is at their workshops and done at the swim pool. If they don't want to take a digital device, they can also print out an attendance sheet. So the system sets it up where they could have them sign in on that as well.

So then let's move during the event. So you. So that ensures that all students are enrolled with dita. That's during the event, they can open it up or they can have that sheet where they can fill it out or they can open up and ensure that everyone's there. They can check the student ID matches their enrollment.

So that they know that they've got the right person there, and then they follow the presenter's guide to cover the course content. So we're just looking at everything they do and then they can mark their attendance. And that's done a couple of different ways, either on a printed out sheet or through the system itself.

And then after the event, so after the event, they. The workshop record form. And that's so that there's information going back about the workshop itself. And then they can also follow up with students to ensure their progress through their assessment tasks. So the presenters still have access to see where the students are up to and and who they are to see where they're up through their tasks.

So that was really the presenter's course process, how things happen. And where you can see there, I've just put up the little dita logos. These the. Where the data we integrate with the process that they needed. We created the forms for the application, which then set up the workshops and gave them the information for their kits.

But then we, the, we then went into the the enrollment forms for the students, created the printout sheets, enrolled the students into their programs. And then we give the course content mark students attendance, et cetera. So you can see there's an integration of what their process is and the steps that we are able to include in for the presenter through that process.

Alright, now let's have a look at the students course and their process. So we looked at their implementation. What happens for a. Attending a course and what the process was there. So once again, it's about what happens before the event day, during the event, and after the event. The, oops let me just click, sorry.

So they receive the theory, so they go online, they book into the course. That's the first thing they do. And then they'll receive their theory work, their enrollment forms, their course and trainer evaluation forms. They'd complete their enrollment forms at step one. And that's so that the the presenters know who's turning up to an event.

And then they'd work on their theory, hopefully if they have time prior to going to the face-to-face event the workshop, they'd complete all of their theory before turning up. And then during the event itself, then we'd attend and Mark competent at the workshop. So they'd get marked in that they were there whether they're competent whether there's any notes can be placed against the students that were at course on the day. So there's any information that needs to be put against their records and then after the event. So it's very simplified during the event. It's just doing that marking process. But then after the event itself, then we are looking at the, to complete the on-job training. And that's all part of the Cumulative training record.

So part of the cumulative training record is what gathers all the information that's required the evidence that's required to understand that they have the skills to be able to get their accreditation and they upload. Their accreditation paperwork. So it might look for some evidence based like their c p r certificates records of training practical training, assessments, et cetera in that process.

So they just upload all of that paperwork in against the accumulative training record. And then they wait for the accreditation approval email. So once they have completed all of their paperwork and submitted it, then that goes through that's the last part of their process. Then they just wait for an email to come to them for their approvals.

And there's two ways that can split out. So at first it may not be approved. And if that's the case, they'll. Notification of accreditation paperwork required. So there might be bits that they haven't quite finished properly. So the system will send them a new email back and let them know what they need to upload or change what document, additional documentation that they need.

The system can go backwards and forwards in that process just to help the student get along the pathway and get to the. Information passed there so that they can get to approved. So once they're approved, they receive an email from the system and that email will include the certificates, so their certificate of attainment and and a course certificate as well.

They are the two implement implementation plans that we structured with this one for the presenters process and then the other for the students course process as. All right. And you can see there, once again, some of those processes are theirs, and some of them are the ones that we in integrated with the data platform once we understood what their process was.

Let's have a talk again with Sally about the results from the transformation. Let's learn more about how the transformation has helped SCTA from.

Tell us about the measurable benefits you have you seen? 

Look, where do I start? There's so many of them. It's hard to choose really, but our student numbers has grown considerably. That's number one. It's really allowed us to grow student completions. So percentage of students completing improved outta sight. It's been terrific. We've increased the number of presenters and tutors. It's getting out there that it's the process to work with us is much simpler than it is with a lot of other RTOs. We are much more profitable now. Cash flow is terrific. Errors have decreased considerably. Overall our processes are much easier on the staff.

Originally processes that may have had 15 transitions now have five. And finally the automations have freed us up to be able to provide a better service to our. It's been terrific. I can't count the measurable benefits we've seen. It's incredible.

Where would SCTA have been right now if you had not chosen to go on a digital transformation pathway?

Look, I truly believe that without going digital with data solutions and with the added covid period that we've just had, we may have seen the undoing of some Australia and air courses. We had nowhere to be able to scale like we have now. We were struggling along our pathway and now we are not struggling at all. If we hadn't have done this it would've been really dire for us.  

And I guess just following up on that question, thinking about the Covid period really interesting there. If you had still been a manual process, would've there been any further continuation through that?

No, we wouldn't have been able to continue at all. And other comp compare, competing RTOs weren't able to continue and we were, which was a real game changer for us.

What are your next steps in SCTA's plans?

Look, SCTA has a really clear path forward now and we're really excited for the new developments coming along. We're partnering with dita again now to bring on our membership platform and dita is allowing us to scale up in many ways. Our courses, hopefully our membership, it'll be a lot easier.

We're in the process of that one. Revamping our courses has been made much easier creating new opportunities for our members to be engaged and educated. It's really is an exciting world for us with many opportunities and we see lots of partnering with dita Solutions to make it happen.

Thanks Sally. Yeah, once again, like the whole process and this whole process with SCTA has been a really enjoyable journey for us as well, and. And that is a lot of that is because of the team there at SCTA and Swim Australia that we've had to work with along the way.

It's been a positive process moving forward. We've worked in together, we've solved problems and we've instigated some a really good technologies in there to help that whole process through. Look, with that let's you. Turn to you you ready for your turn? Let's have a look at how we can transform your business in this process, in this same way.

So I'm just gonna step by step through a process that we look at and how this happens. So the first is, what's your current process? And we talked about this at the start. So it's about understanding your process processes that. Is the crucial for understanding how we can transform things.

So how we can transform it all. And then what are the bottlenecks? So where are your manual processes letting you down? Where are you spending time doing manual tasks? They're the things that we want to try to get un unblock. What are your goals? So let's work to identify what the new goals are which you wish to achieve in your business processes so that we can get to those goals quickly and then map.

New workflows, so it's then us assisting you help map those new workflows out. And as you saw with what I showed, the step-by-step process before with the presenter and the student implementation tasks of that workflow, it's integrating. Yourself, your organizations with the platform itself. So it steps in hand through a workflow process and we map it out so it's all automated.

And through the digital transformation that we've set up with you. And then there's continued improvement. So we don't stop there. Like what we like to do with our clients through digital transformation isn't set and forget, we wanna work with you to continually evaluate your business goals, enter mape new innovation ways or innovative ways to achieve them.

And that's what we're doing with SCTA Now we've gone down step one with the accreditation process and now we're looking at that membership process. With them. So that's the transforming how we can help transform your business. So let's just see what Sally's advice is for other organizations that are thinking about going down this path.

Do you have any words of advice for other organizations looking to start their digital transformation? 

Look, I'd say do it now before you fall too far behind. dita has been the best decision asked us from Australia, has ever made it's a game changer for us. Their customer service is sec, second to none, and they listen.

They really do. When we make a call and ask a question, it's answered promptly. And changes are made instantly. It really has been the best decision we've ever made. So do it and do it now. All right. Thanks very much for your time today, Sally. And I'm sure everyone appreciates all of your answers in the system.

No problems, Ben. Okay. Look, a couple of things keep up to date with us on social media. We're always pushing out on our social. The different channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the new innovations that we're working on. We're also just putting out there all the time little things that we're doing with other organizations so that, you can see, know, there might be something that if you follow us on there, it might trigger you to to think, oh yeah, we really need that in our organization.

So keep up to date with us on social medias. Get in touch with us at info ditasolutions.com. If you're not directly dealing with one of us already contact us by phone or just go to our website, dita solutions.com. We've got an assistant on there that can help you out.

Just before you go firstly, thanks once again to ask you and the team and Sally especially for coming in and and doing the interviews with us. We've got a form just after we finish here today, which you can fill out. There's a book, a timing with myself and Michelle, and we'll help map through those processes.

So it's a free one hour consultation. We've got a timetable set up there that you can book into, and we will sit down with you and go through this process and help you and assist you in any way that we can. Make sure to. To do that before you go. Alright, that's it for today, everyone. Thank you very much.

We look forward to catching up with you in our next webinar. Bye for now.