The Center for Business Analytics is pleased to recognize Prometric as an honoree of the 2023 Drexel LeBow Analytics 50 Awards. Read more about how Prometric used analytics to solve a business challenge.
Submitter
Philip Poletti, Vice President, Channel Operations
Company
Prometric
Industry
Assessment, Education
Business Challenge
The assessment industry historically offered services only through brick-and-mortar storefronts called test centers. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, these centers had to operate according to government-imposed restrictions. A fringe technology within the industry at the time, offering licensure and certification exams remotely, became the only viable contingency. The challenge was scaling that remote solution 1,000 times while simultaneously reopening 450+ global brick-and-mortar test centers after a 1.5-month closure.
Analytics Solution
For reopening test centers, Prometric leveraged external data to understand the occupancy rates in which the company could operate and which customers could be served (some governments only allowed essential services) and layered that with internal data such as customer bookings and staffing levels. The data was disparate, live and ever-changing. In parallel to reopening the test centers, Prometric had to scale its remote assessment solution at a pace never imagined. A proven analytics leader in the business was assigned to build the data infrastructure needed to scale and run the program. This included building, on the fly, dashboards and reports of the end-to-end customer experience. This utilized SQL, Tableau, PowerBI and internal databases to be able to view any part of the customer journey.
Impact
Test centers progressively reopened throughout 2020 in a phased approach. It took nearly one year for all centers to reopen and operate for full occupancy and customer base. The remote assessment line of business grew from serving less than 2,000 test takers a year pre-COVID to over 11,000 per month immediately after COVID restrictions began. Since then, Prometric has tripled its growth, a testament to the foundation of the quick work by the analytics team. Other notable advancements in performance include the introduction of workforce management tools, improved capacity management and end-to-end successful testing metrics that transformed the business by highlighting areas in need of improvement initiatives.