Case Study : Enable
ENABLE is the largest membership organisation in Scotland for people with learning disabilities and family carers. Its National Office is in Glasgow and it has branch offices and care services located throughout Scotland.
The majority of Enable's IT infrastructure is based at their National Office location in Glasgow. The systems located here are only available to National Office staff. This made the provision of email and access to key documentation very difficult for the majority of Enable's staff since they are not based at the National Office, with many working shifts and not having desk-based jobs. In addition the in-house email system was proving difficult to manage with frequent unscheduled loss of service and problems with computer viruses.
Enable started a project to identify their IT requirements and look at the options for implementing these. When Enable heard about the hosted services offered by Business Professional, they were eager to try them out to see if they solved the problems they were experiencing.
The first step was to install a broadband connection at the National Office. Business Professional was able to help them select their broadband supplier and get broadband operational for the sixty IT users at the National Office.
Once broadband was in place, Enable signed up for their free trial of the Business Professional solutions. Their community was set up and their users registered. Business Professional was able to reduce the work load here by utilising the bulk import feature for user information. Because one of their urgent problem areas was email, the first service they made use of throughout the National Office was the email solution based on Lotus iNotes. A short training session was provided to staff to help them migrate from Microsoft Outlook to their new mail system and to ensure a smooth transition to the new system. Because the email system is provided as a hosted service, all email users can access their email from the other offices and from home. In addition to the email facilities, Enable staff also make extensive use of the Chat facility (instant messaging) provided as standard when using the Business Professional solutions.
Once Enable had established the value of hosted applications to their organisation, they set up a joint venture with Business Professional to develop a new application to manage the record keeping associated with providing care to their clients. The objective of this is to reduce the significant administrative burden on Enable staff and simplify compliance with the requirements of the new National Care Standards. The package also maintains the records required for reporting to government bodies such as the Care Commission. This application is now part of the Business Professional portfolio and is available to other organisations responsible for providing care.
The next step Enable undertook was to migrate their existing personnel records to Business Professional's People Manager. With Business Professional's assistance, their existing data was transferred to People Manager and it became their HR system. Initially it was only used by HR staff but Enable have now made it available to all staff.
In addition to these applications, Enable are using a number of the other Business Professional solutions such as Filing Manager and Project Manager. These applications provide central document access and project definition and tracking respectively. As with the email system, all the solutions require only a PC with Internet access - no software is required to be installed on the PC for the applications to work immediately they are made available to staff. The access to the applications is controlled by Enable through the Community Manager application that is a standard part of the solution. As soon as a staff member is given access to an application through this easy-to-use configuration tool, they can start using it immediately.
More recently, Enable have provided Internet access to the branch offices and Homes. This has been done through a combination of broadband, ISDN and modem access, depending on the number of PCs at each location. Wherever possible, broadband access hass been provided at all locations which have more than one PC. Staff at these locations are now able to enjoy all of the facilities that had previously only been provided at the National Office.
"Enable like many other employers runs a range of services which are focused on the needs of their customers - in our case, this requires a 24 x 7 service from a range of staff working in different environments responding flexibly to needs as they arise. We faced a considerable challenge in communicating with our staff, receiving reports timeously and monitoring activity. The solutions provided by Business Professional have enabled us to meet these requirements."
Norman Dunning, Director of Enable.
|