A Statewide Licensing System, Rebuilt at 40%+ Lower Cost and Timeline

The Challenge

The agency's trade-certification program — 24 license types, roughly 8,000 active licensees and growing, records dating back three decades — ran on a legacy system at end of life. The replacement had to cover the full lifecycle: online application with experience verification, examination tracking, payment, certificate issuance and renewal, plus a public portal for applicants, employers, and anonymous license verification, integrated with the state's single sign-on.

Systems of this scope are typically scoped in 12–18 months. The agency needed a replacement that was faster without cutting corners on the certification workflows their licensees depended on.

The Approach

We didn't start from an empty org. Our licensing & permitting solution library — prebuilt Public Sector Solutions configuration refined across prior implementations — was modeled against the agency's requirements before the engagement began. Our AI delivery engine then drove requirements normalization, configuration generation, and test-first quality gates, with our engineers architecting the integrations (statewide SSO, payments) and approving every deployment.

Work was delivered in demoable two-week slices, so the agency had visibility into progress from week three — not at the end of a long build cycle.

What We Delivered

• Full lifecycle on native Public Sector Solutions objects — keeping the agency on Salesforce's upgrade path, with configuration in its own admins' hands after go-live
• Experience Cloud portal — public and authenticated pages, electronic experience-verification forms, secure no-login verifier links, and anonymous license search
• Certificate PDF generation, renewal notification flows, approval/denial routing
• Migration of ~30 years of licensing history — under 400,000 records brought forward intact

The Impact

• 40%+ reduction in cost and timeline compared to traditional implementations of comparable scope
• First working walkthrough at week 3 — org, portal, data model, and first intake form live, compared to week 8 in a typical build-from-scratch engagement
• 17 weeks to full replacement — a system typically scoped at 12–18 months, delivered in demoable two-week slices
• 30 years of records migrated — continuity of licensing history preserved through the transition
• Admin-owned after go-live — native-platform configuration stays on the upgrade path and in the agency's own hands