The context
Studely supports international students with their financing applications. A substantial share of operational work consisted of manually chaining repetitive steps across several tools. Leadership was considering a hire to absorb growth. Our read going in: before adding a person, size the real cost of the missing tooling and identify the most profitable levers.
The need
Identify precisely where the operations team was losing time, then deliver a targeted overhaul rather than a full rewrite that would have taken months. The hard constraint: keep the existing tools where they worked, intervene only on the costly steps, and do not create a new technical dependency. All within a few weeks, in order to turn a hiring trajectory into a productivity trajectory.
What we delivered
An overhaul of the three screens most costly in human time, built in Next.js and Python, backed by a PostgreSQL database. Business automations orchestrated on n8n for the repetitive steps surfaced during field tracking. Integrations via signed webhooks with the tools in place on the CRM, payment and document management side, to avoid any redundant data entry. Progressive rollout on European infrastructure, operator training run in parallel, user documentation transferred. Legacy was not touched where it was doing the job.