Refactoring Proprietary ERP Solution

Issue

Following a string of yearly acquisitions, the group relied on a home-grown ERP to link more than 80 schools and power its lead-to-cash process. Yet the system lagged under growing volume, delivered sluggish response times, and struggled to scale. Users lost confidence, defaulting to mismatched market tools that splintered data and workflows. Fragmented reporting threatened leadership’s real-time view of financial and operational performance, weakening the strategic case for future funding rounds. Without decisive intervention, the ERP risked becoming a liability to both day-to-day operations and long-term value creation.

Approach

Stratos assumed interim CIO responsibilities, driving the internal dev team, complementing with missing expertise and structuring a 15-month roadmap. Phase 1 targeted visible pain points: we refactored critical code paths and optimised queries, raising navigation speed to SaaS benchmarks and restoring user confidence. Phase 2 addressed the back-end—migrating servers, hardening security, and engineering scalable architecture for peak enrolment loads. Throughout, we implemented agile governance, embedded user-feedback loops, and reported progress to the board. Outcomes included a two-fold increase in daily active users and the capacity to handle triple the student volume during the back-to-school surge.

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