Success Story | Central Okanagan Public School District

The investment over time is really important to us because ERPs are not short-term endeavours. They are long-term relationships. We’ll be using Sparkrock well beyond my time in this organization.

Jon Rever

Assistant Superintendent of Schools
School District 23

About Central Okanagan
School District

Central Okanagan Public School District (School District 23) is a dynamic and growing district based in Kelowna, British Columbia. Serving over 25,000 students across 47 schools, the district is committed to fostering inclusive, high-quality education for a diverse and expanding community. With a rising number of newcomer families and English Language Learners, Central Okanagan is focused on meeting evolving needs with compassion, innovation, and equity. Guided by its vision, “Together We Learn,” the district embraces collaboration, continuous improvement, and a shared commitment to student success.

The Challenge: Aging
Systems, Rising Expectations

Central Okanagan used a legacy ERP system that had served their district for over thirty years. Challenges included paper-based, labour-intensive processes that were siloed into separate departments. Many processes were done in detached areas: in the system, on paper, via email, and had to move back and forth between departments.

Jon Rever is Assistant Superintendent of Schools at Central Okanagan and also serves on several technology-related committees for the province. “People did the jobs they had to do [but] didn’t understand the full business processes they were engaged in,” Rever shared.

He added, “We were seeing the level of risk to the organization. Cybersecurity challenges were becoming more frequent and complex. We were worried about the infrastructure. We got to a place where the tolerance of risk to the organization had exceeded a threshold, knowing if something were to break, fail, or be attacked…we wouldn’t have been doing our due diligence to manage and mitigate that risk.”

In addition to these challenges, the district was also grappling with the increased complexity of both educational and business operations.

They began discussing a new solution when Central Okanagan was advised that their ERP software would no longer be supported. The new solution would need to improve overall efficiency, organizational infrastructure, and system security.

“There’s an underlying effort to leverage the technology to achieve efficiencies, to digitize workflows, and recapture some of those labour-intensive dollars. We don’t have a challenge; we have multiple challenges. My role is to find ways to leverage the environment to make things more efficient and deliver better service,” stated Rever.

Sparkrock forced us to come together and understand all our business processes. In Sparkrock, everyone understands that they share the data and are responsible for it. If you don’t do your bit properly, you will affect downstream processes. It helped us get solid on our change management, framework, and strategy.

Jon Rever

Assistant Superintendent of Schools
Central Okanagan Public School District

The Solution:
Future-Proof Efficiency and Security

The decision to adopt Sparkrock was made based on several key considerations. These included improving workflows, enhancing processes, and fortifying the organization's cybersecurity.

Sparkrock Finance is powered by the world’s most trusted education ERP platform—Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. “[This] was a huge decision point for us,” Rever said. “The fact that we could integrate our ERP into our Microsoft ecosystem and see efficiencies from that move by itself was significant. People are used to it, so they aren’t identifying it as a unique change because they’ve been working in this environment already.”

Another key factor was affordability. “We had multi-million dollar submissions, and we couldn’t touch them,” maintained Rever. “Some of these ERPs are just not affordable for school districts because of how we are funded.” Sparkrock emerged as the affordable ERP solution that also served as a strategic response to Central Okanagan's challenges.

The Outcome:
Safer, Faster, Sharper Operations

Enhanced Security

Regarding security, Rever explained, “One of the things that Sparkrock allows us to do is distribute workload across the organization, so we are asking people to engage in processes that they’ve never done before....the digitization of paper-based workflows actually increases our level of security. We can foresee and envision these processes, whether they are happening right now or whether they could happen in the future.”

The reinforced security measures implemented by Sparkrock lay the groundwork for a seamless transition into improved workflow efficiencies.

Improved Workflows

After implementing Sparkrock, Central Okanagan Public School District experienced significant shifts. The school ERP addressed immediate challenges like security and efficiency. It fostered more collaboration and accountability between departments.

“Sparkrock forced us to come together and understand all our business processes. In Sparkrock, everyone understands that they share the data and are responsible for it. If you don’t do your bit properly, you will affect downstream processes. It helped us get solid on our change management, framework, and strategy,” elaborated Rever. “We went live in Finance last May, and I’m starting to hear people say things like, ‘It’s more efficient, it’s more user-friendly. We like it.’ They are adapting to the change, and they are getting used to it.”

Strategic Plans

Sparkrock also positioned the district for ongoing success by leveraging technology to expand reporting and analytics capabilities.

In discussing future goals for their school district, Rever remarked, “The real investment is around PowerBI and using it to generate customized reports for people they can interact with in different ways and filter data easily to distribute those reports out. That’s the future. In our 47 schools, we will build Power BI dashboards for our Principals. They will be able to see their financial information, accounts, staff, attendance, absenteeism, all in one dashboard so they can easily access important information in one spot.”

We have very positive relationships with the Sparkrock team, project managers, and consultants, and that’s how we need to work. Whenever we get into a complex project, the vendor isn’t just the vendor. The vendor is part of the team, and we need to function as a team.

Jon Rever

Assistant Superintendent of Schools
Central Okanagan Public School District

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The Central Okanagan Public School District Grows Securely with Sparkrock

About Central Okanagan
School District

The Challenge: Aging
Systems, Rising Expectations

The Solution:
Future-Proof Efficiency and Security