The Customer
A major player in the Australian Assisted Living, Residential and Home Care market for Aged Care services approached us for assistance. They have a long history of caring success and have been expanding services, especially in the Home Care sector, for several years. Their Board had ambitious plans to increase their investment in Home Care threefold over the ensuing five years. The Board was aware that their software systems were not (and could not) keep pace with their growth potential.
Our Approach
We proposed to make recommendations that would ensure their potential expansion could be possible, whilst also addressing concerns about productivity and efficiency in their office administration. However, we started with a broad strategic overview of the organisation using an approach known as the “Balanced Scorecard”.
We examined their strategic objectives from a financial, customer, product and growth perspective. Our strategy map, including targets and measures, led to a review of their current systems and work practices, with a particularly deep dive into their office administration, management information, procurement, workforce management, staff rostering and accounting systems.
Our Findings
Our review found that some of their systems had outlived their usefulness and no longer met the needs of the organisation. Because their operations had grown separately (residential somewhat separate from home care, for example) there was little interoperability between systems and manual workloads were frequently created to transfer data from one system to another. For example, Residential and Home Care used separate products for staff rostering and time and attendance, which made integration with Payroll very difficult. Government reporting was another weak point, as software had not managed to keep up with new government requirements in recent years.
The majority of systems were aged, monolithic and unsuited for sharing and collaboration. To make matters worse, most legacy systems had not been updated for some time, and some were incapable of being updated.
Recommendations
Our recommendations to the Board included replacing most systems in a flexible, modular approach, using best-of-breed off-the-shelf products for each requirement. The establishment of robust API’s to support the transfer of data between systems would ensure integrity (and substantially reduce manual workarounds). As expansion proceeded at pace, and new technology requirements were identified, newer products could be integrated into the architecture simply by updating the API’s.
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