AlterEducS: A Digital Breakthrough for After-school Services

About AlterEducS

AlterEducS (AES) is a non-profit social entrepreneurship project offering a catalogue of extra-curricular activities for schools. They welcome children outside of school hours and during holidays and offer them activities that meet their needs. In order to achieve this objective, they mobilise the Educational Alliance: the ecosystem that revolves around the child's learning. Christian and Christophe, the two founders of the project, have been working since 2018 to develop a methodology and training courses aimed at professionals in the education field. 

AES is working towards the goal building a disruptive project that will reform the education model in Belgium. The current economic model of AES is based solely on the income generated by parents' research in terms of activities. This demand meets the supply deployed through the AES catalogue. A search for additional income is underway to finance the structural costs related to the development of the project.

Learn more about AES at https://www.altereducs.org/ 

Digitally Lagging Behind

In Belgium, the education system is lagging behind digitally. Education is free but due to a lack of funding, schools are limited in what they can provide their students making the management of after school clubs difficult. Therefore, when discussing the digital infrastructure and follow-up for after school clubs it is easy to see that not much attention has been placed in this area.

AES wanted to change this and decided to implement Odoo with two main objectives:

•  Digitalise AES’ offer via a webshop

•  Digitally transfer the administrative and financial follow-up triangle (school, parents and partners)

AES reviewed a number of ERPs on the market and decided to use Odoo due to its affordability, customization abilities and its user friendliness. AES quickly realised that even though Odoo is open source, they knew it would be best to make use of an experienced firm to help them deploy their Odoo solution. Working with Odoo implementation partner Niboo, an Odoo solution as close to the standard version was implemented. They began by installing the following apps: Sales, Website, Inventory and Accounting and implemented customised functionalities to meet AES' needs.

In the app contact, a "child" contact type was added with a birthday field to calculate a child's age over time. The website form has been modified to allow parents to login and register their children. A "child" and "birthday" field appears on the registration form and this information is then listed in the back-end. There is also the option to add several children on one registration form via the “add a child” option. Having these additional fields allows AES to calculate a child's age and assign age appropriate courses and activities. A school module was also added in order to search for links between a parent or child and a particular school. 

In the sales module, each quotation and order includes a line with the child and the activities to which they are linked. Order lines including information on the parent, child and date of birth columns are displayed in list view for quick reading. Via the order lines, it is also possible for AES to send an email to parents to notify them of an event, absence or a delay.

Overall, adding an administrative and financial management monitoring dimension to AES' educational offer has been a unique selling point which is rather new in the extracurricular childcare sector. Odoo has provided AES with credibility and professionalism to their clients (school principals), partners (activity providers) and the final beneficiaries (parents and their children).

AES’ Odoo solution has been devised to deploy service in the best possible way. All their stakeholders have access to the management tool and Odoo has become the nerve centre of the platform’s ecosystem. Ultimately, the implementation of an ERP has enabled AES to create a differential advantage and innovative breakthrough in a sector that is lagging behind digitally.