Westminster Theological Seminary: 259 Hours Saved, $130K in Outsourcing Avoided
Software Engineer
Saved 259 hours annually and avoided $130K in outsourcing costs by automating workflows across Canvas, Populi, Circle, and Help Scout.
Westminster Theological Seminary: 259 Hours Saved, $130K in Outsourcing Avoided
The Challenge
Westminster Theological Seminary is a graduate institution with a complex operational stack spanning multiple departments. Their core systems—Canvas (learning management), Populi (student information system), Circle (community platform), Help Scout (support ticketing), Zoom, and Airtable—operated as isolated silos.
The consequences were predictable: manual processes eating up staff time, fragmented student experiences, and a growing backlog of integration needs that external vendors quoted at up to $130,000.
Specific pain points included:
Fragmented student experience. Students bounced between Canvas, Circle, and Populi with no unified dashboard. Community spaces lived in a completely separate app, disconnected from their courses.
Manual enrollment management. Every enrollment change required manual updates to Circle access. Staff spent hours on repetitive switching and students experienced delays accessing their communities.
Support ticket chaos. Help Scout tickets arrived without student context, landing in shared inboxes where staff wasted time routing tickets to the right people.
Tedious recurring tasks. Instructor payments required manual Airtable work every pay term. Zoom recordings for language and counseling courses needed manual distribution. Course resets at term boundaries consumed hours of clicking.
The seminary needed more than a quick fix. They needed someone who could understand the entire ecosystem, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and build production-grade solutions fast.
My Approach
I joined Westminster as their in-house technologist & software engineer with a clear mandate: increase team bandwidth, clean up data workflows, and open new possibilities for their learning experience.
My approach was systematic:
- Audit the full stack to understand how data flowed (or didn't) between systems
- Identify highest-ROI automation targets based on hours saved and pain reduced
- Build incrementally with production-grade solutions, not brittle scripts
- Leverage AI tooling to move at a pace typically requiring multiple engineers
This last point matters. By integrating AI into my development workflow, I operate at what I'd estimate is 5-10x the speed of traditional development.
What I Built
Circle + Canvas Integration
I embedded Circle directly into Canvas so students see their course community without leaving the LMS. More importantly, I automated access management: when a student's enrollment changes in Populi, their Circle access updates automatically.
- Total automation runs (Oct - Aug): 1,170
- Estimated time saved: 18 hours per year
This eliminates support tickets from students stuck in the wrong community or locked out entirely.
Help Scout Ticket Routing & Context
I wrote a script that pulls student context from Populi and displays it directly in Help Scout tickets, then auto-assigns tickets to the appropriate Student Success staff member.
- Total automation runs (Oct - Aug): 1,596
- Estimated time saved: 125 hours per year (10-15 minutes/day across two inboxes)
Staff now spend their time helping students instead of triaging tickets.
Zoom Recording Automation
Language and counseling courses require session recordings delivered to students. I automated the entire pipeline: recordings flow from Zoom to students without manual intervention.
- Total automation runs (Oct - Aug): 694
- Estimated time saved: 40 hours per year
Instructor Payment System
The existing Airtable-based payment workflow required manual processing every pay term. I refactored it into a streamlined automation.
Estimated time saved: 16 hours per year (2 hours per term across 8 terms)
Canvas Course Reset & QA Automation
At the start of each term, courses need to be reset and checked for quality issues. I built automation to handle both.
- Estimated time saved: 60 hours per year (~1 hour per course reset x 60 courses)
Custom LTI Tool (Proof of Concept)
Canvas is notoriously limited in terms of UI/UX customization. In a single day, I built a working LTI tool that pulls content from a headless CMS and renders it inside Canvas with full creative control.
This opens significant possibilities: synchronized video + slide displays for lectures, rapid content corrections, and a path toward a unified student dashboard integrating Canvas, Populi, and Circle.
Results
Quantified Impact
| Automation | Annual Hours Saved |
|---|---|
| Circle integration | 18 |
| Help Scout routing | 125 |
| Instructor payments | 16 |
| Zoom distribution | 40 |
| Canvas course resets | 60 |
| Total | 259 |
Additional Impact
- Outsourcing avoided: External integration partnerships (e.g., Populi ↔ Sage Intacct) were quoted at up to $130,000. In-house development proved dramatically more cost-effective.
- Automation runs (Oct–Aug): 3,460+ total executions across all systems
- Speed to value: Working LTI proof-of-concept delivered in one day
- Scalable foundation: The infrastructure I built positions Westminster to reduce SaaS costs by consolidating onto internal tools and automations
The Takeaway
Westminster didn't need a development team. They needed one senior engineer who could see the whole picture, move fast, and deliver production-quality solutions.
I work at a pace that typically requires a small team—without the communication overhead, onboarding time, or coordination costs. When you combine senior-level experience with AI-augmented development, you get results like this: 259 hours saved annually, $130K in outsourcing avoided, and a proof-of-concept LTI tool built in a single day.
If your organization is drowning in manual processes, struggling with disconnected systems, or sitting on integration projects that vendors want six figures to build—let's talk.