How Konekt Implemented Kampus Pulse and Axis at ICBS: Rollout, Training, and Adoption

Imperial College of Business Studies (ICBS) is a private higher education institute in Sri Lanka offering CIMA, degree, MBA, MSc, and DBA programmes. Like most growing institutions, ICBS had reached the point where paper attendance registers and in-person fee payments were holding the campus back — not because the processes didn't work, but because they couldn't scale with student numbers or give staff the real-time information they needed.

ICBS engaged Konekt to implement Kampus Pulse, a student mobile app with GPS-based attendance and in-app payments, alongside Kampus Axis, the student information system that ties attendance, fees, and records together. The brief went beyond installing software: ICBS needed a rollout plan that worked around live classes and active intakes, and a training programme that left lecturers, finance staff, and administrators confident using the new tools from day one.

Before the rollout, ICBS ran on processes familiar to many institutions:

• Attendance was recorded on paper registers and re-entered into spreadsheets, with no way to spot at-risk students until it was too late.
• Students paid fees by visiting the accounts office in person or emailing bank transfer slips, and the finance team spent hours each week chasing late payments by phone.
• Attendance and payment records lived in separate systems, so reconciling the two meant manual cross-checking.

The bigger challenge wasn't the gap between old and new systems — it was getting from one to the other without interrupting an active term. Lecturers couldn't stop taking attendance while staff learned a new app, and the finance team couldn't pause fee collection mid-semester. Any rollout plan also had to account for a wide range of digital comfort levels across academic and administrative staff.

Discovery and stakeholder workshops. Before any configuration began, Konekt ran sessions with the registrar's office, finance team, IT department, and a sample of lecturers to map current workflows, fee structures, and campus boundaries for GPS-based attendance.

Data migration and integration planning. Existing student records, programme structures (CIMA, degree, MBA, MSc, DBA), and fee schedules were migrated into Kampus Axis, with Konekt's team validating each batch against ICBS's existing records before go-live.

Pilot before full rollout. Rather than switching the whole campus over at once, Konekt ran a pilot with one faculty for two weeks — surfacing configuration issues and refining geofence boundaries and notification thresholds before wider release.

Phased go-live. Once the pilot was stable, Kampus Pulse and Axis were rolled out faculty by faculty across the rest of the term, so no single week saw a campus-wide disruption.

The implementation centred on getting people, not just systems, ready:

Train-the-trainer for department heads. Konekt trained a core group of department heads and senior administrators first, giving them the depth to support their own teams after go-live.

Role-based training sessions. Separate hands-on sessions were run for lecturers (marking attendance, reading attendance dashboards, and following up on at-risk students), finance staff (reconciling Kampus Pulse payments against Kampus Axis records, managing fee plans and reminders), and front-office administrators (handling student queries about the new app).

Reference materials and recordings. Each session was recorded and paired with short reference guides, so staff who joined later or needed a refresher weren't dependent on someone else's memory of the training day.

Hypercare support. For the first two weeks after each faculty went live, Konekt's team was on call to resolve issues in real time — geofence adjustments, login problems, payment sync questions — before handing over to standard support.

By the end of the rollout, every faculty at ICBS was using Kampus Pulse for attendance and payments, with Kampus Axis as the single source of truth behind it.

Attendance moved from paper registers to automatic GPS-based check-in, with lecturers and students both able to see attendance standing in real time — and automated alerts going out before a student's attendance became a problem. On the finance side, students could see and pay outstanding fees directly from their phones, with payments syncing to Axis automatically. The finance team's weekly follow-up calls dropped sharply, and on-time fee collection improved significantly.

Just as importantly, the rollout didn't disrupt a single week of classes or fee collection — and ICBS now has an internal team of trained department heads who can onboard new staff and support future Kampus rollouts (including Kampus Sense for AI-assisted academic tools) without leaning on Konekt for every question.