STFW

At a glance

The Swiss Technical College Winterthur (STFW) is one of the leading continuing education institutions for technical professions in German-speaking Switzerland. The school administration software, originally developed in-house and now over 20 years old, could not be adapted to today’s requirements at a reasonable cost. The STFW replaced it with the school, course, and event management solution daylight from Winterthur-based daylight AG.

daylight enabled the STFW to centralize and significantly optimize its existing course administration processes. Financial accounting and other peripheral systems were integrated via interfaces. The STFW will soon begin implementing the daylight web front end as well as integrating e-learning, class scheduling, and grade management.

STFW – A Leading Continuing Education Institute for Technical Professions

The Swiss Technical College Winterthur (STFW) is one of the leading continuing education institutes for technical professions in German-speaking Switzerland. It focuses on six areas: automotive engineering, electrical engineering, communications technology, building services engineering, advanced technical training, and executive training, and works closely with leading professional and industry associations.

The institute offers advanced vocational training, federal certifications, as well as corporate, certificate, refresher, and short courses, along with inter-company courses in basic vocational training. Each year, approximately 90,000 men and women complete courses and programs at STFW that are tailored to practical needs and emphasize the “learning by doing” approach.

Wanted: a new, future-proof core application

“Our solution, which was over 20 years old, could not be adapted to today’s requirements at a reasonable cost,” says IT Director Roger Zimmermann, describing the initial situation. “We faced the challenge of replacing our core application—which we use to manage all training modules, schedules, instructors, and course participants, as well as to handle all billing—with a new, future-proof solution.”

The company was looking for a user-friendly solution that could effectively map and optimize processes and allow for the easy integration of best-in-class solutions and existing peripheral systems. Additional requirements included the manufacturer’s geographic proximity and a long-term commitment. Following a multi-stage evaluation process, daylight AG’s school, course, and event management solution emerged as the winner.

Open architecture enables flexibility

“To avoid overwhelming our users, we are rolling out daylight’s individual functional modules in a structured manner,” explains the IT director. Currently, STFW uses daylight to manage all 500 basic training and continuing education modules, 3,000 course participants (including grades), as well as all staff and instructors.

For accounting, Abacus was integrated via the standard interface. For the highly complex scheduling, the school continues to use its own scheduling tool. The schedules created there are then imported into daylight for actual appointment management. The IT manager describes daylight’s open architecture as the ideal solution: “daylight is our stable and streamlined core application that centrally provides all data and covers the most important functions. For specific tasks, we connect dedicated tools via interfaces.” Currently, 20 employees from administration, finance, sales, and marketing work with daylight on a daily basis.

Goals Met or Exceeded

According to Roger Zimmermann, the set goals were fully achieved. Thanks to daylight, data that was previously isolated in individual data silos is now centrally available to the entire organization and can be managed efficiently.

The IT manager mentions further improvements: “We were able to centralize and optimize numerous processes. daylight’s analysis and evaluation functions support us in quotation planning and marketing. The integration with financial accounting works perfectly—we were able to significantly simplify our invoicing processes.”

With Daylight, we were able to implement new technologies quickly and flawlessly and optimize our processes.

Roger Zimmermann

Head of IT, Swiss Technical College Winterthur

 However, he also points out: "The biggest challenge when introducing a new IT solution in a large organization is usually not technical. It's the users who don't like to get used to new things."

The IT manager praises the high stability of daylight and the responsiveness of the daylight team to support requests.

"I have a personal contact at daylight AG. Through this 'single point of contact,' I can submit requests and support inquiries directly and usually receive a response very quickly."

When asked about future expansion steps, Roger Zimmermann once again refers to daylight’s open architecture:



 "In addition to the web front end, our main focus in the near future will be supporting school operations with daylight. We will integrate the online learning platform Moodle and the external tools for grading and class scheduling into daylight."