Centro de la Familia, a non-profit organization serving children and families in NV, UT, and CO, has been a beacon in the early childhood education sector for nearly 50 years. Centro de la Familia’s primary mission is to prepare low income families to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.
Challenges
Inefficient Document and Data Management
Tracking the lifecycle of numerous documents and activities, from health screenings to educational assessments, was challenging, disjointed, and time-consuming for the employees. Lorena Cervantez, Family Partnership Specialist at Centro shares how daily tasks were stored in different places for different Family Service Specialists, “Some had Excel sheets, some had it written down, some had it on calendars.” Centro de la Familia wanted a solution that held all their data entries in one consolidated location so direct service staff could spend more time with the people they serve.
Data Accessibility and Reporting
Centro de la Familia, managing 1,200+ children across 27 centers, faced challenges in generating meaningful reports due to limitations of their legacy system, Child Plus. Despite an API connection allowing data extraction into a warehouse, backend changes made by Child Plus disrupted their custom reports and dashboards, leading to significant limitations and increased financial burden. The system’s lack of functionality for reporting on specific regional needs, including Centro’s migrant program in region 12, added to these issues. To address these challenges and enhance service delivery across all regions, Centro decided to develop a more flexible and reporting solution.
User Experience and Efficiency
Staff at Centro de la Familia found the previous system, Child Plus, cumbersome, and not user-friendly, which hampered their daily operations and detracted from their time with those they serve. Teachers faced significant challenges due to the system’s design, resembling a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool with multiple forms across various pages, complicating daily tasks and elongating training for new users. Managers also battled with unstable reporting features caused by backend updates, leading to inefficiencies in data monitoring. The need for a more intuitive and efficient system was clear among teachers, while managers desired a solution that could streamline data into clear, actionable reports. Danny Reyes, Health Manager at Centro de la Familia said, “with the previous application, we were not allowed to customize some of the activities that we ask our staff to complete, and the reports were not working all the time. There were some issues with the system feeding into our dashboards, and it was just not compatible with (other technologies) we were using.
Solution
Centro de la Familia partnered with JourneyTeam to overhaul their data management and reporting systems through the development of a custom Microsoft Power App they named C-FIT. They chose the Microsoft Power Platform to create a Power App, integrating it with other Microsoft technologies already in use. This solution was designed to streamline data entry, improve data visibility through Power BI dashboards, and enhance communication within the organization. The app included features for entering data on attendance, meal tracking, health, and incident reporting. It allowed for easy access to critical information, making daily operations more efficient for teachers and staff and more impactful for the organization.
When JourneyTeam helped train us on the new Power App, they came to our center and sat down with us as a group. They walked us through each area of the program and answered any type of question we had.
Mindi Casto, Education Specialist
Outcomes
Streamlined Operations and Efficiency
C-FIT has dramatically decreased the time needed for data entry and management. What previously took teachers approximately 5 minutes for daily tasks can now be accomplished in just one minute. This enhancement in data management enables teachers to devote more attention and time to their primary responsibilities and the children they serve, while also reducing the time managers spend on generating data reports.
Enhanced Data-Driven Decision Making
At Centro de la Familia, each content area manager was given the responsibility to develop their section of the Power App with input from direct service staff. By drawing on their own experiences, they were able to tailor the app’s processes and design to ensure both ease of use and functionality for the user. This approach facilitated the creation of an app with features suitable for all the regions served by their programs. Centro also now has full ownership of their data, ensuring that their investment in creating custom reports and dashboards is unaffected by updates or modifications from third-party software.
Improved User Experience
The development of C-FIT has significantly simplified tasks for both teachers and managers at Centro. For teachers, C-FIT has made data entry more efficient by consolidating forms onto a single page, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple pages. This consolidation, along with a simplified user interface, reduced the training period from weeks to just 1-2 hours, compared to the previous system, Child Plus, allowing teachers to devote more time to their educational responsibilities. For managers, C-FIT improved the efficiency of activity monitoring with enhanced dashboards, solving the problem of having to run multiple reports to gather necessary data—a process that was both time-consuming and inefficient with the old system. C-FIT not only made data entry and monitoring faster but also ensured the reliability and accessibility of data, empowering management to make more informed decisions and allocate their time more effectively.
Our new Power App is so simple that it only takes users one hour of training with a supervisor, and that’s pretty much all our users need. The app itself is very user-friendly, and self-explanatory.
Euleta Christiansen, Senior Program Specialist