Modernizing Grant Management: From Fragmented Legacy Systems to a Scalable Cloud Platform
A large educational organization needed to replace five outdated, end-of-life subsystems responsible for managing and approving Perkins Grants across hundreds of districts and schools. The existing systems were siloed, with manual or semi-automated data transfers that caused delays, errors, and high maintenance overhead. Running on on-premise servers, the platform lacked scalability, reliability, and modern security standards.
The Challenge
Our Approach
We were selected to design and build a completely new system from the ground up. Our process included:
Conducting regular workshops with stakeholders to gather and document detailed business requirements
Designing a modern technical architecture and selecting the optimal technology stack
Creating a detailed project plan with sprint boards in Azure DevOps
Developing a full-stack solution including responsive UI, robust APIs, optimized databases, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines
Migrating existing data and business logic to the new cloud-based system on Microsoft Azure
The new system was launched successfully with minimal disruption. Users benefited from a clean, intuitive, and fully responsive interface that guided them through processes more efficiently.Key outcomes included:
Significantly improved user experience and reduced processing delays
Full cloud benefits: automatic backups, built-in redundancy, and elastic scalability
Reduced maintenance costs through automation, allowing the team to focus on enhancements rather than firefighting
Multiple isolated environments (Dev, Staging, UAT, Production) for safer testing and faster deployments
Substantially improved security with modern practices, comprehensive logging/monitoring, and mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA)
This modernization project transformed a high-maintenance legacy platform into a secure, scalable, and future-ready solution that continues to support efficient grant management today.
The Results
Streamlining Reporting: From Siloed Systems to a Centralized Analytics Platform
A growing organization was struggling with inconsistent and hard-to-maintain Power BI reporting. Their reports relied on complex data models embedded directly inside Power BI files, leading to frequent metric errors, difficult debugging, and slow troubleshooting. With no centralized data store or data warehouse, data was pulled from multiple disconnected systems and tools, making joins unreliable and report development time-consuming.
The Challenge
Our Approach
We designed and implemented a modern, centralized reporting solution to eliminate these pain points. Our process included:
Building a clean, denormalized reporting database optimized for fast and accurate reporting
Implementing automated data ingestion using Azure Data Factory (ADF)
Creating an efficient workflow where users simply drop files into Azure Storage — triggering ADF to automatically load and process the data into the reporting database
Developing new Power BI reports on top of the new centralized architecture
The new solution delivered reliable, consistent reporting while dramatically simplifying the report development process.Key outcomes included:
Significantly improved data accuracy and easier debugging, with all calculations staged clearly in the database
Faster report creation and maintenance using the centralized reporting layer
Self-service capability — users could upload new or updated data files themselves without needing a developer or power user
Reduced dependency on manual data joins and embedded models, leading to fewer errors and greater confidence in reported metrics
This modernization transformed their reporting from a fragile, high-maintenance process into a scalable, user-friendly system that continues to support better decision-making.
