Data Foundation
At a Glance
Horizon Education Centers (HEC) has been shaping the lives of children aged 6 weeks to 14 years old for over 48 years. As a non-profit early childhood education provider operating across multiple centers and funding streams, HEC made a deliberate decision to build a data infrastructure that matched the scale and ambition of their mission. Partnering with Paragon Shift, HEC connected its systems, automated its data flows, and gave leadership a unified view across all centers for the first time. Attendance reconciliation time dropped by 70% for center administrative staff, total weekly manual reporting hours fell from 100 to 29, and the team that had been spending evenings on reconciliation got their time back.
The Decision
Founded in memory of Mary M. Smith, Horizon Education Centers has spent nearly 5 decades delivering high-quality care and education to children and families across its centers. HEC’s mission is clear: to provide early childhood education, care, and youth development programs that significantly shape the lives of the children in their care. As a non-profit operating across multiple locations, HEC manages a genuinely complex funding environment spanning parent payments, grants, and publicly funded childcare programs, each with its own compliance requirements.
Delivering on that mission means asking the right questions every day. Is every child getting the support they need? Are our programs reaching the families who need them most? Where can we do more for the children and communities we serve? Are we meeting the compliance requirements that protect our ability to serve publicly funded families? How do we replicate what is working well across every center we operate? As HEC grew, answering those questions with confidence required something that did not yet exist: a single, connected view of the organization’s data.
Attendance was captured in Procare, HEC’s child management platform. Publicly funded children were also tracked in Kinder Connect, the state’s system. Financial data lived elsewhere. Each system held valuable information, and bringing it all together into one view while meeting state compliance requirements required building the right infrastructure. HEC’s leadership recognized this and proactively decided to invest in it.
Across their centers, teams were investing approximately 100 hours every week in data collection, reconciliation, and reporting, work that often extended into evenings. This was time the team gave with dedication, and time HEC’s leadership wanted to redirect toward program quality, family services, and the strategic priorities that would carry the organization forward. They partnered with Paragon Shift to make it happen.
The Approach
Paragon Shift began by working closely with HEC’s leadership and staff to understand how information moved across the organization, where the greatest opportunities for automation are, and which decisions the leadership team needed better visibility to make. Rather than replacing HEC’s existing systems, the solution was designed to connect them intelligently and automate the data flows between them.
The result was a cloud-based data infrastructure built on Microsoft Azure that automatically pulled attendance, compliance, and operational data from Procare and Kinder Connect, and ran continuously in the background without staff intervention. A Power BI dashboard gave leadership a live, unified view across all centers: enrollment figures, attendance data, compliance status, and operational performance, all in one place and available in seconds.
Throughout the process, the Paragon Shift team worked in close collaboration with HEC by conducting brainstorming sessions, staying responsive at all hours, and taking the time to understand the organization’s needs even as requirements continued to take shape. The solution evolved alongside HEC, not ahead of it.
“The team has been very responsive to our needs, and they listen well. They are getting to know our business and come up with suggestions that are helpful to us.” — Sharon Knaggs, CFO, Horizon Education Centers
The Results
The impact was immediate and measurable. Across HEC’s centers, weekly manual reporting hours dropped from 100 to 29, amounting to a 71% reduction. The coordinators and admin staff who had been spending evenings on reconciliation got their time back.
Beyond the numbers, HEC’s leadership gained something equally valuable: the ability to see the full picture of the organization in real time. Enrollment trends, attendance patterns, compliance status, and program performance across all centers are available instantly, without navigating multiple systems or building a single report by hand.
“Rather than going to two, three, or four different systems to get information, we’re able to find it in one place.” — Sharon Knaggs, CFO, Horizon Education Centers
For a leadership team that had always asked the right questions, they could now answer them with confidence and act on them faster.
“It gives us information we didn’t have before — the business intelligence to see trends and recognize patterns that we didn’t before.” — JD Smith, COO, Horizon Education Centers