A 'nutritional education station' for health professionals and the public

A second KTP project with London South Bank University is taking The Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION) to the next level

ION, an educational charity who trains nutritional therapists and educates the public about nutrition have taken on a second KTP project with LSBU in order to create a central database to enable a clear and more precise understanding of all ION customers and members. “The idea of the database is to enable us to gather information on our customers which is currently separated in various departments, and bring it all together for easy access from one place,” comments Laksh Ranganathan, KTP Associate.

ION, who in the past 25 years have built a strong reputation as a key player in the field of nutritional therapy, realised that to keep up with the competition they needed to strengthen their product offering and diversify their nutritional based services to new markets both in the UK and in Europe in order to maintain the top spot and preserve their market share. “We currently hold about 25-30% of the UK market. We would like to target foreign markets as well because so many of our students are international. If we grow we can reach more people which is a good thing, a great thing for us as a charity,” explains Peter Szabo, ION Business Manager, and KTP supervisor.

The partnership is allowing ION to increase their capacity to and expertise in order to apply for the many project opportunities currently available in the health and nutrition arena. “One of the key things the project can provide for ION is how to manage each aspect of this business, what processes they need to put in to get more out of their internal communications and make their systems more efficient. The goal is to embed operational efficiency – as the project grows we can look at the business model and find new markets or set up new products,” reports Laksh. Peter agrees with Laksh’s vision for this project and says “it will make our operations more streamlined. When the processes become automated we can spend more time doing what we want to do which is talking to students, the public…we want a much bigger interactive presence so people can talk to us in many different ways.”

ION hopes that the increased operational efficiency will have positive side effects such as the ability to gain more students and therefore create more money to turn back into the company, public information and events. “I think we could take on another 5 KTPs because we want to do so many things,” praises Peter.

Lead Academic Colquhoun Ferguson has recently joined LSBU from the University of the West of Scotland, and brings to the project his experience with numerous Scottish KTPs, ranging from implementation of E-learning applications, Knowledge Management strategies and CRM development.

Colquhoun adds, “ION understand the benefits to be realised from participation in KTP, and this project follows in the footsteps of a previous, very successful collaboration with LSBU. This is a very exciting project in which ION now hope to develop a system to expand revenue generating opportunities, by integrating their current internal systems into a new, comprehensive CRM.”