Challenges

Data integrations between internal systems
By integrating important systems for WOLF such as management dashboards, financial administration and ERP (with information about students and the occupation of the instructors), we created valuable new insights. The marketing dashboard now shows how many leads each marketing campaign raises, which percentage of leads converts to customers after a trial lesson and what the total customer value is. The dashboard also allows WOLF to determine the availability of the instructors per location and time period. The connection to ERP allows students to plan their own lessons and pay through iDEAL. Thanks to the connection with the financial administration, payments are booked into the administration right away. In short, the insights in essential company information allow WOLF to substantially increase the efficiency of the business operations.

Using Drupal with an API-first approach
The idea early on was to build a webapp that could also serve as a hybrid mobile app, so we could make use of native functionalities (like push notifications) and distribute to multiple platforms in a cost efficient way. Because we were going to build a single page application, we needed an API-first approach. The challenge was not only to serve content pages from the CMS, but also to keep track of a user's progress inside the app. A user will watch some videos and perform some other tasks the user will be prompted to. These tasks come from our Drupal configured endpoints. The progress in performing these tasks (and how many times they have been completed) is stored in the Drupal environment. We used endpoints from two different systems to keep track of a student's progress and to provide the correct task(s).

For example: the student has just completed a lesson. The instructor filled in a new scorecard, indicating which elements the student is thriving on, and which elements need a little more attention (homework). The student opens the app and reflects on the recently completed lesson. The student is able to see the instructor’s note, as well as possible homework assignments. A possible homework assignment can be to watch a video about parallel parking. The data from the scorecard comes from the ERP, the data to check if the student has completed this “homework” comes from our Drupal API and is stored to the Drupal environment once the task has been completed.

The data from these systems comes from one API gateway. The Drupal environment also serves as a proxy to the ERP’s available endpoints. This way, the frontend can be kept simple and scalable (only one base API URL to talk to). It also means that client keys / secrets of third party API’s, like the ERP, can be safely stored on the server side. The drupal environment also provides a set of basic configuration options for each endpoint, so we don’t have to deploy each subtle change to an endpoint.