Customer story highlights

• Consolidated 13 separate institutes into one unified statewide RTO in 2017, now enabling over 139,000-plus students to achieve their education goals, annually.
• Built a single, trusted data foundation that underpins a consistent student experiences, government reporting, and evidence-based decision making.
• Evolved a decade-long partnership with TechnologyOne into a collaboration supporting the broader VET sector.

About TAFE Queensland

TAFE Queensland is the state's largest and most experienced training and education provider. With a 144-year history of practical, hands-on training, it delivers industry-relevant qualifications from entry-level certificates to bachelor degrees.

Nearly 140,000 students train with TAFE Queensland each year across 60-plus campuses, in-person and online, from Thursday Island to Coolangatta and as far west as Mount Isa.

TAFE Queensland’s website

The challenge: Managing growth and complexity across fragmented systems

Alan Chapman has been Chief Information Officer at TAFE Queensland for eight and a half years, a period that has spanned much of the organisation's consolidation journey. He has experienced firsthand the challenges of bringing 13 institutes together.

"The consistency of processes and practices wasn't there because it was largely up to the individual institutes how they did that," Mr Chapman said.

"Every institute had their own collection of solutions for supporting the business that they were in. Even though they used the same systems, they were completely separate inside those systems."

That lead to significant duplication across the state, even where institutes shared the same departmental platforms for financial management, student management, payroll and more.

Delivering a consistent training product at scale needed more than new software. It required a shared foundation.

Having already partnered with TechnologyOne for years, including a partnership through the TAFE Queensland Scholarship Program, the next step was an obvious one.

The solution: A unified student management product built for scale

TAFE Queensland implemented TechnologyOne's Student Management product, in addition to:

• Financials
• Supply Chain Management
• Enterprise Content Management

Delivered as part of the OneEducation industry solution, Student Management replaced the fragmented legacy environment with one consistent statewide solution, driven by the needs of the students and the staff delivering the services..

"The student experience has always been king for us. Anything that can help us improve that student experience, inform that student experience," Mr Chapman said.

"We're here to deliver outcomes for communities and outcomes for individuals. We're here to change lives."

That focus shaped the implementation. Rather than replicate the old way of working, TAFE Queensland shifted from a delivery-centric to a student-centric view, with one consistent training product and the same outcomes no matter where students are studying.

The operational impact was just as significant. TAFE Queensland moved from 13 different sets of data to one, with a single source of truth for all core student information from applications through to results, completion and reporting.

“We have consistent data statewide, and we can know a lot about our organisation and know it consistently well."

With one platform and one data set in place, TAFE Queensland had the foundation to deliver at scale. The next step was to put it to work.

The results: Trusted data, stronger compliance, and a partnership that delivers

With the unified solution in place, TAFE Queensland had a consistent way to run the organisation day-to-day:

• Customer service staff now manage applications and enrolments from one place
• Educators track student progress through the same system
• Management staff work from real-time metrics on how the business is performing.

The impact on compliance has in particular been substantial. Government reporting in the VET sector is complex, and funding is tied directly to the quality of the data being reported. With a clean, statewide dataset now underpinning reporting, TAFE Queensland produces better quality output straight from the system efficiently.

For example, a standard VETMIS report that once took 13 to 14 hours to run now completes in three to four hours, even with a much larger volume of data. That’s a time saving of more than 70%.

"TechnologyOne has built a lot of the reporting for us because part of what we engaged you around is that the compliance requirements we're obligated to meet are built into the contract," Mr Chapman said.

"When compliance requirements change, TechnologyOne does the work to mean that the reporting is adjusted to meet the compliance requirements."

Students see the benefits directly too. Through the student portal, they can manage their applications, enrolments, study plans, results, and awards, regardless of which campus they attend or whether they study online.

It’s also proven its ability to integrate with the wider technology environment. Where TAFE Queensland needs capability that sits outside the core product, TechnologyOne has provided the integration pathways to make it work.

"Conversations with TechnologyOne around integration haven't been difficult at all," Mr Chapman said.

"TechnologyOne has been happy to open the doors to allow us to integrate with other systems and address the things that we need for our business."

Their advice? Use a partner who understands the TAFE sector

Reflecting on what has made the partnership work, Mr Chapman points to something that sounds simple but is surprisingly rare: a technology provider that genuinely understands the Australian VET sector.

Most student management vendors are built for the university market, which operates very differently from vocational education and training.

This combined with TechnologyOne being headquartered in Brisbane, that made it well suited to partner with TAFE Queensland.

“A large multinational organisation, but based here in Brisbane, has meant that we have access to the people building the solution and the people thinking about what comes next," Mr Chapman said.

"We get direct access. We talk to them. We engage with them. We get to influence the direction somewhat, face-to-face.”

That local presence has been matched by a genuine investment in the VET sector.

"One of the things we love about TechnologyOne is that they understand the Australian context. Most of the vendors in the student management space are very much university focused," Mr Chapman said.

"TechnologyOne has taken the trouble to understand the VET sector, which is very complex and difficult.

"When we come along and say, 'Hey, it doesn't quite work like that,' they've got people who understand how it does work and are prepared to listen to us and help implement changes."

Looking ahead: Building on a stable foundation as the VET landscape continues to evolve

TAFE Queensland's approach to what comes next is consistent with its journey so far: incremental, data-led, grounded in the foundation already built and student focused.

Some of that work already benefits the broader sector. For 18 months, TAFE Queensland and TechnologyOne have been developing a machine intelligence product that extracts and validates information from student identity documents without staff involvement.

Like many innovations from the partnership, it'll soon be available to every TAFE using TechnologyOne.

"A lot of what we do with TechnologyOne, we understand that for all of your customers, we're part of a community where the community has input as to how the problems are solved," Mr Chapman said.

"And then the community benefits when those problems are solved."

For TAFE leaders considering the road ahead, TAFE Queensland’s advice is simple: start small, plan well, build the foundations, and find the right partners who care about your outcomes as much as you do.