Altai’s Advanced Certification solution (ACCS) was first released in 2010 utilizing the Microsoft CRM platform. We’ve been enhancing and expanding its capabilities for the last 10 years to bring you the best solution possible. The ability to extend and enhance the solution is one of the strengths of the Altai Business Platform. It is designed to be personalized to your organization’s needs while maintaining an unhindered upgrade path. By configuring CRM instead of writing custom code, Altai meets our client’s short-term requirements while allowing our clients to adapt their configurations as new requirements arise.
Our certification solution is highly flexible and is designed to support basic certification requirements as well as automate complicated certification programs, continuing education programs, business rules, and recertification processes – all managed by your staff from a single system. this includes a powerful rules engine that can manage the most complex certification programs that your staff can adjust as needed without coding. They will also be able to monitor certification status, track and approve applications, and easily update application forms and online processes from the Altai business platform back office. Our solution covers everything from the application processing to exam management, to certification and re-certification.
Importantly, our Certification solution is part of the AMS product and is fully integrated across all modules (i.e. Certification, Membership, Events, Education, Finance, etc.). This provides a seamless experience to your users and access to all related information. As with other areas of our solution, certifications are tracked from Web to GL. While Altai has been working with certification organizations since 2010, in 2012, we engaged with the Project Management Institute (PMI) to replace their existing systems. This included certification, membership, education, and multiple integrations that included: financial, credit card processing, Prometric’s exam management, etc.. Working as a team, we were able to consolidate five different systems into one, move their million-plus members into Dynamics CRM; replace and automate a number of their certifications, integrate with Great Plains Dynamics, Prometric, and their website. During this time, Altai significantly expanded their solution to meet the needs of enterprise organizations; and incorporate a tool we call the “Business Rules Engine” into our solution that provides the ability to apply complex business rules without using code. Since then, we’ve deployed our solution to a number of organizations including:
- The Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI), an international organization that certifies HR professionals around the world. As part of the project, we replaced their certification, recertification, membership, and education management solutions with our integrated Certification and Membership AMS solution. They have been live on their systems for over 2 years now and are continuing to expand its functionality and deploy new certifications and products with little to no effort on our part. This was one of the project goals, to enable HRCI to take ownership of the system and extend it based on their business needs.
- Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), a national organization that provides key elements in perpetuating success throughout the healthcare industry thru its membership and certifications. MGMA also replaced several existing applications with our integrated Certification and Membership AMS solution. Similar to HRCI, MGMA has to continue to expand its functionality and deploy new functionality and products with little to no effort on our part to better support their business units’ needs.
In the following sections, we will delve deeper into the Altai Certification solution, the respective functional areas, and how it will work for you
- General System Overview
- Certification and Recertification Setup and Management
- Application Processing
- Exam Management and Processing
General System Overview
The table below provides an overview of the modules/areas that comprise and support the Altai Certification solution and some of the benefits that our clients receive.
Certification and Recertification Setup and Management
Your staff will be able to set up the requirements for each of your certifications easily within the system as well as the rules and requirements around recertification. The requirements that you setup will control how the certification/recertification processes are managed and applications are processed. This includes items such as:
- Available Exams for Certification
- Requirements associated with an exam such as “Eligibility Period”, “Wait Period”, “Exam Extension Period”, “Exam Failed Retake Wait Period”. You can add additional required as needed.
- General Certification requirements such as “Education Level Required” and “Work Experience Required”.
- Additional requirements such as “School”, “Work” and you can define your own requirement types.
- Auditing rules – i.e. “Audit Threshold”, “Audit Counter”, “Recert Audit Threshold” and “Audit Recert Counter.
- Recertification requirements – i.e. “Allow Recert by Exam”, “CEU’s Required”, “Work Experience Required”.
Once again, all of these rules are configurable within each Certification and additional ones can be added as part of the configuration.
The screenshot below provides a sample of how certification can be setup. The implementation of these rules and the Altai web portal will enable your certificants to:
- Maintain their profile information, upload their picture, and capture any of the data needed for you to better support and manage your certificants.
- Complete applications for certification and recertification.
- Submit required documentation for certification and recertification (i.e. Student transcripts, Letters of Reference, Resumes, Vitas, or CVs).
- Purchase and schedule exams for certification and recertification.
- Monitor their exam status and see the results.
- Monitor their certification and recertification status.
- Track and submit their Continuing Education (CEU’s, PDU’s, CE’s, etc.) as part of their recertification process
Based on your organization’s business rules and requirements, you can use the Web Portal to collect and manage the Certificant data you need.
Application Processing
Using Altai’s certification/credentialing solution, applications can be processed manually via a submitted paper application or on-line using our web portal. Once submitted, the application will follow your business processes. The Dashboard below provides an example of how you can see and manage your applications. The applications are queued based on “Certification being applied for” and “Application Status”. Your staff will quickly see what’s in their queue to work on. The solution supports the configuration of different “Application Statuses” so that you can map your certification process to the system and organize queues based on your business processes.
Exam Processing
Exam processing is typically one of the key components of certification. Whether exams are required for certification and are used for recertification, the Altai Certification solutions support both. We provide support for tracking all relevant Exam data, the ability to collect additional data as needed, and the ability for Exam retakes (if that is part of your business process). Exams can be included as part of the application process or be purchased as part of a class, event, or on their own. Within the system, you associate the required exams with each of your available certifications. Exam registration can be set up as an “Open Window” format based on the requirements associated w/ the certification setup (shown in the certification sample above) or scheduled on a “Cycle/Window timeline” basis (sample provided below).
Sample Cycle
Below is a sample of an Exam setup and includes all our standard data elements. Note that you may not use all of these options and some of them are associated with testing center data requirements, but they are available.
Altai has integrated with a number of exam providers including Pearson VUE, Prometric, Castle, Course Mill, etc.… These integrations have included from:
- SSO for easy login access
- Registering for an exam
- Canceling or rescheduling an exam
- Collecting exam results and related data
The table below provides a sample of our Pearson VUE integration that also includes a connection to the Acclaim digital badge solution. NOTE: The Acclaim digital badge integration isn’t a requirement but is available for our customers who use it.
