Head office
Northern Ireland, UK
When Inclusion Quality Mark (IQM), the national award for inclusion, expanded from a 12-school pilot into an organisation supporting more than 7000 schools across the UK, the Middle East and Asia, its original systems struggled to keep up.
By adopting SugarCRM and working closely with Provident CRM, IQM has refined and automated key processes, saving thousands of hours each year and delivering timely, consistent support to every school it works with.
Northern Ireland, UK
2004
Education Services
2022
For 21 years, IQM has helped schools improve their inclusive practices. Its work spans nursery, primary and secondary phases, further education colleges, specialist schools, and alternative provision settings. Each year brings new pupils, staffing changes, and shifting expectations, which the organisation’s assessments and awards must accommodate.
As IQM’s CEO, Joe McCann, explains, the organisation needed a CRM system that could match the scale and pace of its work.
“Inclusion never stops. You have new children coming every September, you have new teaching staff; everything keeps changing,” he shares. “For us, CRM technology has become a real part of driving our business forward.”
IQM’s first CRM was a bespoke, spreadsheet-based system with limited functionality. The legacy CRM became a bottleneck as IQM grew from a 12-school pilot to more than 7000 schools across the UK, Middle East and Asia, creating problems including:
Heavy administrative workload: Each enquiry booking and award or review required manual emails and updates handled by staff rather than the CRM system.
A long-winded booking process: Matching schools with assessors, confirming availability and regularly coordinating with finance personnel took more than three hours per booking.
No ability to build or manage workflows: Tasks such as reminders, renewals and follow-ups could not be automated or scheduled.
Limited reporting and search capability: IQM needed to review thousands of records across 156 local authorities, multi-academy trusts (MATs) and multiple award stages. Joe McCann notes: “As we grew, and we grew quite rapidly, data needed ways of being searched and regulated. The spreadsheet system simply couldn’t cope.”
Data risk: With no dependable backup, a serious outage could have resulted in significant data loss.
In 2011, IQM adopted SugarCRM to move beyond its spreadsheet-based system and gain more reliable data access, stronger reporting, and a platform capable of supporting its growing workload.
SugarCRM’s Community Edition was an improvement, but as IQM expanded, the entry-level version had limitations. The team needed deeper workflow tools, email automation, better filtering, and a CRM that could evolve alongside the organisation.
“We realised the community version could only take us so far,” Joe explains. “It didn’t have the workflow capability or the email tools we needed.” He added,
Upgrading to SugarCRM’s enterprise-level features made that possible, but IQM wanted expert support to ensure the system was properly configured.
“As we grew, and we grew quite rapidly, data needed ways of being searched and regulated. The spreadsheet system simply couldn’t cope.”
– Joe McCann, CEO, IQM
The pace of transformation increased in 2022 when IQM partnered with Provident CRM. Instead of offering generic configurations, the Provident CRM team took time to understand IQM’s operations in detail — from how schools progress through award cycles to how assessors are allocated, reviewed and supported.
Working collaboratively, Provident CRM helped IQM:
✓ Configure SugarCRM to match how the organisation works with schools, assessors, and contracts
✓ Build automation and workflows that replace manual, repetitive tasks
✓ Expand SugarCRM usage from six users to 14 as the organisation grew
✓ Improve reporting and visibility, especially for local authorities and MATs
Monthly strategy sessions were set up to review progress, discuss ideas and refine workflows. Provident CRM’s enhanced support package gives IQM a single point of contact who understands the organisation and can quickly bring in the right expertise. Joe values this simplicity, and said,
To support IQM’s growing operational demands, Provident CRM introduced several significant improvements across the system.
The booking process, which had previously taken more than three hours per assessment, was rebuilt as a fully automated workflow to manage assessor allocation, confirmations, and finance notifications with minimal intervention.
IQM’s annual and monthly review cycles were reworked into structured workflows, removing the need to track and prompt schools manually.
Reporting and visibility improved considerably, as Provident CRM developed dashboards and advanced reports to give IQM a clear, immediate view of schools, awards, local authorities and multi-academy trusts.
Weekly document generation tasks were removed by combining SugarCRM’s Doc Merge feature with workflow automation. IQM also upgraded to SugarConnect, an email client add-in, to leverage secure email archiving so that every communication with a school is captured in one place.
As IQM expanded internationally, they integrated an API-driven school portal and advised on data segmentation to support regional partners while maintaining a global operational view.
SugarCRM, configured and improved with support from Provident CRM, has substantially impacted how IQM manages its core processes.
IQM’s assessment bookings were once one of the team’s most time-consuming tasks. An automated workflow now manages each step, contacting assessors in sequence, assigning the first person who accepts, notifying finance, and confirming details with schools.
This single workflow saves an estimated 2,160 hours each year, giving IQM more capacity to support schools and onboard new facilities.
Awards follow multi-year cycles, and each stage requires clear communication. A consolidated workflow now manages the full timeline, sending reminders, scheduling prompts, and avoiding communications during school holidays.
Automated lead-nurture emails provide consistent follow-up to new enquiries. Together, these automations save hundreds of hours annually and give schools reliable, structured support throughout the process.
Scheduled emails ensure enquiries, registrations and award cycles receive timely attention. Schools remain supported, and IQM is notified when human input is needed. As Joe notes, many schools value the steady, encouraging contact: “They appreciate the nudge to get on with the process,” he shares.
IQM produces a range of assessor documents and report templates each week, many of which draw on information stored in SugarCRM. The system’s Doc Merge feature allows users to generate documents directly from records using custom templates — pulling in school details, award stages and assessor information without manual copying.
Previously, a team member spent around two and a half hours each week creating these documents and emailing them individually to assessors. Now, a workflow-triggered process selects the correct templates, generates the documents instantly and sends them to the right assessors for the week ahead.
With SugarCRM, IQM can filter thousands of records across 156 local authorities, breaking results down by school type, monitoring award timelines, and exporting accurate summaries. This visibility also supports forecasting and workload planning, helping the organisation allocate assessors more effectively.
IQM’s bespoke portal connected to SugarCRM allows them to see real-time progress as schools complete documentation. Updates flow directly into SugarCRM and maintains data accuracy through defined approval steps. The portal has been especially valuable as IQM expands internationally, allowing schools in other time zones to progress tasks without waiting for the UK team to come online.
As SugarCRM is hosted in the cloud, IQM benefits from dependable backup, live access across regions, and a lower risk of data loss, an essential requirement for an organisation working with thousands of schools worldwide.
IQM wants to keep evolving its use of SugarCRM and is already exploring several improvements to help it support schools even more effectively.
One of the top priorities is further automation. Some of IQM’s processes still require partial manual input, and the team is identifying the areas where workflow enhancements could remove that final layer of admin.
“There are a couple of processes that are part-automated, part-manual,” Joe explains. “We’re looking at how we can make them fully workflow-driven.”
As IQM’s international footprint grows, data segmentation is another focus. The organisation works with partners in the Middle East and wants to ensure each region has access to the data relevant to them, while the UK operations team maintains a full overview. Provident CRM has already helped IQM implement initial segmentation, and the next phase will extend this structure as more regions come on board.
IQM is also considering integrations that will enhance its assessor allocation capabilities. For example, the team is exploring the use of mapping tools to calculate travel distances automatically, which will make the booking process more efficient.
As IQM enters new countries and refines its processes, SugarCRM will continue to serve as the operational backbone, and Provident CRM will guide the organisation towards simplified, scalable workflow designs.
Provident CRM is an independent digital consultancy and an Elite Partner of SugarCRM, the highest partnership level awarded by Sugar. The company has also been recognised by the All-Ireland Business Foundation (AIBF) as Business All-Star CRM Provider of the Year 2026, reflecting its proven expertise and commitment to delivering exceptional customer outcomes.
With experience supporting hundreds of organisations across Ireland, the UK, and Europe, Provident CRM helps teams successfully adopt, customise, and fully leverage SugarCRM to simplify operations, improve visibility, and enhance customer engagement. Their approach focuses on aligning CRM technology with real business processes, ensuring solutions are practical, scalable, and widely adopted by users.
Provident CRM’s highly trained team holds advanced certifications across multiple business and technical disciplines, enabling them to deliver complex CRM implementations with confidence. From strategic advisory and system design to customisation and long-term optimisation, Provident CRM partners closely with customers to ensure their CRM investment delivers measurable, lasting value.
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Trevor Rogerson |
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Senior Sales Executive |
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+353 1 6930000 |
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trevor@providentcrm.com |
