Ionic Partners, Sparkrock’s parent company, recently acquired Edsembli — an integrated K-12 ERP and SIS ecosystem that provides school districts with the tools needed to streamline human resources and payroll, finance, and the student experience.
While the dust is still settling, we are excited for what the future holds as we start to integrate Sparkrock and Edsembli to create a powerful platform that combines our advanced ERP with industry-leading human resources and payroll capabilities.
We recently interviewed our Head of Product, Ash Prasad, to learn more about his vision for the two products, what the future holds, and other insights.
Ash: We always knew Edsembli was an industry-leader in the K12 education software space. They’ve developed sophisticated solutions for managing complex payroll structures and collective bargaining agreements in education, alongside their flagship SIS and FIN solutions.
For us, this acquisition is a way to combine our strengths to create a next-gen solution directly tailored to the evolving needs of K12 education.
Plus, Edsembli’s has earned a reputation in Ontario for providing educators and administrators with the tools needed to improve visibility and enable better decision making across school districts. We believe the credibility they’ve built up over years will be further enhanced and amplified as we grow together.
We also see Sparkrock’s Microsoft-enabled capabilities and intelligence as the perfect fit for Edsembli’s existing platform. We saw what school districts have already seen — Edsembli offers a unique and necessary platform for K12 education.
Ash: There’s no denying Edsembli specializes in human resources and payroll for K-12 education. They’ve spent years developing features and processes to manage the unique challenges this sector faces.
Specifically, the pay grids and overall management of collective bargaining agreements are unparalleled. Edsembli works closely with school districts to ensure their solutions are easy to use and provide a feature-rich experience to all end-users.
We also like how they’ve focused on the requirements of Ontario school districts, which we feel will allow us to create a market-leading solution to serve all of Canada.
Ash: Edsembli’s SIS will play a crucial role in Sparkrock’s future focus on giving K-12 the tools they need to help students succeed. We’ll combine the capabilities of both platforms to create a central hub for education data, financial services, and human resources and payroll systems.
By enhancing the existing SIS platform, this will allow us to create a unified user experience, equipping employees with more accurate data, streamlined processes, and easy-to-use portals.
We also plan to leverage AI to generate powerful insights from student data to provide a deeper layer of visibility into student outcomes and achievement. This will allow teachers to take proactive corrective action to create ideal learning environments and support students.
The overarching goal of our upcoming integration is to support better decisions by providing school district’s with a holistic view of their finances, human resources and payroll, and student experience.
Ash: We have near-term and long-term plans for how we will integrate Edsembli’s ecosystem into Sparkrock’s ERP solution. Payroll, benefits, student information, and everything else a school district needs will all be in one place.
Another core focus is expanding process automation for recurring processes to free up time and optimize workflows. For example, when a new employee is hired, we’ll sync info from HRP directly with our finance platform.
Looking further out, we’ll integrate secure AI capabilities that simplify finding important information. We want to make it easy for users to find important information with AI-powered search and self-service.
Ash: Ultimately, our overarching vision is to create a comprehensive platform combining our strengths to give K-12 school districts across Canada access to a market-leading platform.
Sparkrock’s unrivaled expertise in K-12 ERP — combined with Edsembli’s powerful HRP and SIS solutions — support and accelerate this vision.
Our better together philosophy will allow us to provide school districts with solutions powered by the latest technologies, cutting-edge AI, and mobile tech to develop and refine intuitive, accessible, and predictive tools for K-12 education.
We’re confident that our solution will become the market leader for K-12 school districts across Canada.
Want to learn more about Sparkrock and Edsembli's partnership? Reach out to our team today!