We take pride in the following tools and services we provide to LT&D as part of their IT support, enabling us to boost productivity with our Power Automate project.

Power Automate

SharePoint Optimisation

Company Background

Established in 1996, Languages Training & Development (LT&D) is a dynamic training provider. They deliver English Language and Teacher Training programmes, along with a range of other Functional and Vocational Skills programmes across the world, from their centre near Oxford.

Typically training more than 100 teachers per year, often from abroad, LT&D are one of the leading providers of the Trinity College London (TCL) Certificate and Diploma in TESOL. TCL are recognised throughout the world as one of the two ‘established’ awarding bodies in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) and graduates have gone on to work around the globe, often returning to continue with their training.

LT&D’s status as an official provider for the EU and UK government means the programmes attract significant funding or are sometimes completely free to qualifying students, which was part of the operational complexity that LT&D approached Vissensa to solve. All Teacher Training programmes include work and study experience placements with partner schools in Europe, South America and the Far East, meaning teachers gain experience with younger learners as well as adults.

Client: Languages Training & Development
Industry: Education
Services: Teacher Training and English language Teaching

Challenges for LT&D Oxford

The challenges faced by LT&D Oxford were not uncommon to a business that has to respond to a consumer lead transactional model, where the consumer in this instance are students enrolling on courses and who need to provide evidence that they entitled to enrol, and where specific checks as to their status are also required.

LT&D had a very well-defined process for these checks, but these were mostly manual and took up a lot of valuable time. Tasks, such as creating the same folders and saving email attachments for multiple users, were having to be performed on a daily basis, and it was affecting the amount of students that could be enrolled and productivity generally. By taking up so much time, these tasks were drawing valuable resources away from places where their skills could be better utilised completing higher-value activities.

Where did Vissensa get involved?

LT&D were already a Microsoft user and were utilising SharePoint as a central repository for the enrolment process. The problem was they had no automated connectivity between the emails received from students, the validation of information from the students and the SharePoint site. The solution also used Moodle, an Education Land development platform, as part of their delivery mechanism. This is when LT&D decided to look for a solution that would pull all of this process together, finding Vissensa and our Power Automate projects.

Our Solutions – Creating a Power Automate project for LT&D

Vissensa found the perfect solution to the issue of time-consuming manual processes in Power Automate, a powerful automation tool by Microsoft, that is able to tackle various workflow challenges.

With this we were able to set up an automated process (called a ‘Flow’) that could create folders within a SharePoint site whenever a new row was added to a specific spreadsheet. This solution meant manual folder creation was no longer required whilst ensuring seamless organisation of documents. Vissensa also configured further Power Automate flows to automatically save email attachments received in a shared mailbox into the newly created folders, reducing human intervention and potential errors. This meant that all the admin team at LT&D had to do was add a new resource to a spreadsheet in SharePoint with the required fields. Once saved, the Power Automate flows kick in to create a root folder based on the resources name and unique ID then, within this root folder, a set of standardized sub folders. Now, when that student submits emails to a shared mailbox containing various attachments, those attachments are saved into the relevant resource folder.

We also implemented YotiSign, a DocuSign-style system, alongside our Power Automate project. YotiSign was set up so that there is a dedicated account, with YotiSign, for each document type that comes in. The admin team used to log onto YotiSign as themselves and send emails out for signing, with the responses coming back into their named email account. However, now they can just log in as that document type account and send out the signing request. The signed email then goes to that Yoti Account, which is actually a Shared Mailbox in 365. This kicks off the Power Automate Flow to save that particular document in the correct SharePoint folder.

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