04 Mar What this home care industry player can save in a year will blow your mind!

We met with a customer last week who asked us to look at their inefficiencies. The resulting discovery output is typical of what we find upon meeting clients for the first time, but the immediate financial benefits in this case, blew us away.

 

OVERVIEW

 

The home care industry is by nature a mobile industry. Whether its support workers giving non-medical care to age care patients, or physiotherapists attending vital appointments at patients’ homes, there’s enormous amount of information being sent back and forth, then filed at Head Office.

 

Our client in this case, employs 1800 support workers attending the homes of 10,000 clients for various home care visits. There are roughly 7,500 client visits per week.

 

In addition, 4 staff at head office schedule visits, manage appointments and cancellations that occur on a daily basis.

 

 

PROBLEM #1

 

The manual processing and distribution of schedules is extremely time and resource consuming. Once a schedule is created by the back office software, it is then printed and sent (yes, sent. As in Australia Post style!) to their employees.

 

The smallest subsequent change in that schedule becomes a costly exercise.

 

The other overwhelming issue revolves, once again, around paperwork and time. Once a worker has finished a visit to a home, he or she needs to manually fill in their timesheet. That timesheet then begins it’s approval journey, slowly meandering from staff to supervisor, to manager and eventually payroll for more processing.

 

 

 

SOLUTION #1

 

By tailoring the VIPS timesheet and rostering app for this business, the scheduling of workers and appointments would be completely automated. Delivered to each employee’s smart device in real time, it would also allow for staff to be instantly notified of changes, cancellations and acknowledgements.

 

This implementation alone saves 3 days of processing per 150 employees per week. The approximate dollar saving across the business is an overwhelming $374,000 per year. Add to that, the postal saving on time and stamps alone, to the order of $50,000 each year.

 

When it comes to scheduling changes, it is hard to estimate the cost savings but the labour component of having to communicate changes would be substantial. The cost of calls and labour required to process these calls would decrease for both the business and it’s employees.

 

With each employee, supervisor, and manager able to enter in and approve time-sheets online, VIPS looks to drastically reduce paperwork in this department too.

 

 

PROBLEM #2

 

Without effective communication, a message can turn into error, misunderstanding, frustration, or even disaster by being misinterpreted or poorly delivered. In the case of this business here, clear communication is imperative, some would say lives depend on it.

 

Upon discovery, VIPS found the communication process to be slow, and again, excessively manual. Information sheets regarding patients’ conditions such as MS or Dementia, OH&S procedures, training tips and procedures are still being printed, stapled and sent via snailmail.

 

It is not a stretch to say that in this fast moving world, some of the information is already “old news” by the time it reaches its recipients.

 

SOLUTION #2

 

Cue the VIPS resource library application. This VIPS mobile app is able to houses a library of resources for the employees. This information is updated in real time, it can contains videos and graphics and head office can make sure that important messages are being watched and ticked off.

 

Increasing the flow and availability of important information to mobile workers also eliminates the cost of printing, manual collation and labour costs of distribution of the information.

 

To further improve communication, our VIPS Online service applications support a voice and video messaging system. Head office can create a memo or video which is instantly distributed to each support worker’s smart device.

 

A message can be delivered to one, a group or all Support Workers using the Group feature of the mailbox. Importantly to our client here, there is no call cost for the messages to be played through the devices.

 

Financially, if our client adopts the VIPS Resource library and online service apps, they could be saving themselves close to $100k pa.

 

 

If your business is ready to scale, but your processes are not, it will greatly hold you back. Slow communication, overworked, frustrated staff, and bad customer service experiences resulting from inadequate processes will bring your growth to a screeching halt.

 

To set yourself up for success, you need to offload many of the mundane tasks employees and head office staff need to perform. Not only will automation help you scale, but you will benefit from the flexible nature of a solution like VIPS, so you can scale your system as business grows.

 

If it’s time to make your greatest move yet, call VIPS today on 1300 788 801

Need more convincing? Why not get to know our apps in more detail here?