School ERP Case Study | Kawach Technology

Client Overview

Bright Horizons School Group

Bright Horizons School Group runs three campuses across Bengaluru, but until early last year, those three campuses operated like three completely separate businesses. Each one kept its own paper admission files, its own Excel sheets for attendance, and its own fee ledger — and none of it talked to each other. When the group's leadership asked a simple question like "how many seats are open across...

Industry

Education · Education Software Development

Business Size

3 campuses, 4,200+ students

Location

Bengaluru, India

Business Model

Private K-12 Education Group

Project Duration

7 months

Existing Challenges

Admissions relied on physical forms and manual data entry, taking up to 3 weeks per intake cycle.
Attendance was marked on paper registers by 140+ teachers, then re-typed into Excel by admin staff — a process prone to errors and delays.
Fee collection and reconciliation were tracked in separate spreadsheets per campus, making group-level financial reporting nearly impossible.
Parents had no way to check a child's attendance, grades, or fee dues without calling the school office.
Report cards were compiled manually in Word documents, taking teachers 2-3 full days per term.

The Challenge

What We Were Up Against

Bright Horizons School Group runs three campuses across Bengaluru, but until early last year, those three campuses operated like three completely separate businesses. Each one kept its own paper admission files, its own Excel sheets for attendance, and its own fee ledger — and none of it talked to each other. When the group's leadership asked a simple question like "how many seats are open across all campuses this term?", getting an answer meant phone calls to three different front-office coordinators and a few hours of manually reconciling spreadsheets.

The pain was sharpest during admissions season. Every application arrived as a physical form, was manually entered into a campus-specific spreadsheet, and then cross-checked by hand against available seats — a process that stretched to nearly three weeks per intake cycle. Attendance wasn't much better: 140+ teachers marked paper registers every morning, which admin staff then re-typed into Excel at the end of each day, introducing errors and a 24-hour lag before anyone could act on an attendance concern.

Parents felt the disconnect most directly. There was no way to check a child's attendance, see term grades, or confirm a fee payment without calling the school office directly — and during peak admission or exam season, those calls could mean a 15-20 minute hold. Report cards, meanwhile, were compiled manually in Word documents by teachers, consuming two to three full working days every term that could have gone toward actual teaching.

Our Solution

How We Built It

We started by spending three weeks physically embedded across all three campuses — sitting with front-office staff during live admissions, watching teachers mark attendance, and following a fee payment from collection to reconciliation. That groundwork mattered more than any line of code: it surfaced edge cases (sibling discounts, mid-term transfers between campuses, partial fee waivers) that a requirements document alone would have missed.

The result was a single, unified school ERP built around six core modules: online admissions with automated seat allocation, RFID-based attendance capture that syncs in real time, structured fee management with an integrated payment gateway, a digital gradebook that generates report cards automatically, a parent-facing mobile portal, and a group-wide dashboard for school leadership.

Rather than launching everything at once, we shipped in priority order — admissions first, timed to be ready ahead of the next intake cycle, followed by attendance and fees, and finally the parent portal. We piloted the complete system on the flagship campus for six weeks, running it in parallel with the old paper process, before rolling it out group-wide. That parallel-run caught a handful of edge cases in fee proration that would have been painful to fix after a full launch.

Training was deliberately hands-on and small-batch: rather than one big rollout session, we trained front-office staff and teachers at each campus in small groups, backed by a dedicated support hotline for the first month. That investment paid off — the system carried the school group through its first full admission and exam cycle without a single reported data-loss incident.

Key Modules Delivered

Admissions & Enrollment

Online application forms, document upload, seat allocation, and automated waitlist management.

Attendance Management

RFID card-based attendance capture at classroom entry points, synced instantly to the central system.

Fee Management

Structured fee plans per grade, online payment gateway integration, and automated reminders for overdue payments.

Gradebook & Report Cards

Digital markbook for teachers with auto-generated, brandable report cards exported as PDF.

Parent Portal & App

A mobile-friendly portal where parents view attendance, grades, timetables, and pay fees online.

Admin Dashboard

Group-level dashboards comparing enrollment, attendance, and revenue across all 3 campuses.

Goals & Objectives

What Success Looked Like

Centralize Operations

Bring admissions, attendance, fees, and academics onto one platform accessible across all 3 campuses.

Reduce Administrative Load

Automate repetitive manual work so front-office and teaching staff could focus on students, not paperwork.

Improve Parent Communication

Give parents real-time, self-service visibility into attendance, grades, and fee status.

Enable Data-Driven Decisions

Provide school leadership with group-wide dashboards for enrollment, attendance trends, and revenue.

Features Developed

What We Built

Online Admissions

Digital application forms with document upload and automated seat allocation.

RFID Attendance

Tap-in attendance capture synced instantly to the central database.

Online Fee Payments

Parents pay fees online with automatic receipt generation and reminders.

Parent Mobile Portal

Real-time visibility into attendance, grades, and dues from any device.

Management Dashboards

Group-wide reporting across all campuses for school leadership.

Technology Stack

Built With the Right Tools

We selected every technology based on this project's real requirements: compliance obligations, scalability needs, and long-term maintainability. No trend-chasing, only battle-tested solutions.

Backend

Laravel 10 PHP 8.2 MySQL 8

Frontend

Vue.js 3 Tailwind CSS Chart.js

Infrastructure

AWS EC2 S3 CloudFront RDS

Integrations

Razorpay Payment Gateway RFID Hardware SDK Twilio SMS

Development Process

How We Delivered It

Agile delivery with regular demos and continuous deployment. Full transparency at every stage.

Total Timeline

7 months

Started → Ongoing

1

01

Discovery & Process Mapping

Spent 3 weeks on-site across all 3 campuses observing existing admissions, attendance, and fee workflows to map every edge case before writing a line of code.

2

02

UI/UX Design

Designed low-clutter interfaces for non-technical front-office staff and teachers, validated through 2 rounds of usability testing with real school staff.

3

03

Phased Development

Built and shipped modules in priority order — admissions first, ahead of the new academic year, then attendance and fees, then the parent portal.

4

04

Pilot on One Campus

Ran the system in parallel with the old paper process on the flagship campus for 6 weeks to catch issues before a full rollout.

5

05

Group-Wide Rollout & Training

Trained 140+ teachers and front-office staff across all campuses in small batches, backed by a dedicated support hotline during the first month.

6

06

Post-Launch Support

Provided 3 months of on-call support to carry the school group through its first full admission and exam cycle on the new system.

Security & Compliance

Built for the Strictest Standards

Student Data Privacy

Role-based access controls ensure only authorized staff can view a student's personal and academic records.

Payment Data Security

All fee payments are processed through a PCI-DSS compliant gateway — no card data ever touches our servers.

Data Backups

Automated daily encrypted backups with a 30-day retention window protect against accidental data loss.

Results / KPIs

Measurable Impact

Numbers measured at 6 months post-launch, independently verified by the client's operations team.

-70%

Admission Processing Time

-45%

Fee Collection Turnaround

6 hrs

Teacher Admin Hours Saved / Week

92%

Parent Portal Adoption

Before vs. After

Before	After
3-week manual admissions cycle with physical forms	Fully online admissions completed in 4-5 days
Attendance re-typed manually from paper registers	Real-time RFID attendance synced instantly campus-wide
Fee reconciliation done separately per campus in Excel	Single group-wide fee dashboard updated in real time
Parents called the office for attendance/fee updates	Parents self-serve everything through the portal/app

"

Before Kawach built our ERP, running three campuses meant three different spreadsheets, three different headaches every fee season. Now our principals see everything — enrollment, attendance, collections — on one screen. Our front-office staff finally have time to actually help parents instead of drowning in paperwork.

ME

Meenakshi Iyer

Group Director of Operations, Bright Horizons School Group

★★★★★

Key Achievements

Why This Project Matters

Beyond the numbers: what this project changed day-to-day for Bright Horizons School Group and the people who rely on what we built.

Zero-Downtime Exam Season

The gradebook and report card module handled the first full exam cycle for 4,200+ students without a single reported data-loss incident.

Full Group Rollout in 7 Months

All 3 campuses were live on the unified system before the start of the new academic year, meeting the client's hard deadline.

92% Parent App Adoption

Nearly all parents actively use the portal within the first term, dramatically cutting phone calls to the front office.

FAQ

Common Questions

Have more questions? Book a call with our team.

How long did the full rollout take?

The complete project — from discovery through group-wide rollout across all 3 campuses — took 7 months, timed to be ready before the new academic year began.

Did the school need to replace its existing hardware?

No. We integrated with RFID readers already installed at two campuses and supplied compatible readers for the third, avoiding unnecessary hardware costs.

How was staff training handled?

We ran small-batch, hands-on training sessions for front-office staff and teachers at each campus, backed by a dedicated support hotline for the first month after go-live.

Can the system scale if Bright Horizons opens new campuses?

Yes — the platform is built to onboard additional campuses without any architectural changes, just new campus records and user accounts.

Related Case Studies

How Bright Horizons School Group Digitized Admissions, Attendance, and Fees Across 3 Campuses