A vocational training provider was losing learners between sign-up and first lesson. The journey took roughly 7 days and crossed 9 separate emails, 2 forms, and a payment confirmation that arrived by hand.
The pipeline we built
Sign-up triggers a single state machine that handles payment, identity check, course assignment, materials provisioning, and welcome — in that order, in parallel where possible. The learner sees one clean status page; the admin team sees one queue with exceptions only.
Median activation went from 7 days to under 8 hours. Two part-time admin roles were freed for higher-value work — onboarding became a feature, not a chore.