Industry: Healthcare information systems
Employees: 2,500 (approx)
Solution: Mobilizing time management
The Challenge
Since 1974, this healthcare information systems company is at the forefront providing Electronic Health Records (EHR) solutions, revenue cycle management applications and connectivity services for medical and dental group practices and hospitals throughout the U.S. With the healthcare industry growing at breakneck pace the need for new ways to simplify and streamline operations to keep business moving forward faster was at its paramount.
Relying on SAP for time recording helped the company to optimize professional services revenue channels and improve productivity gains. Employees accessed SAP from desktops and laptops to track and manage time recording and approvals, however; a cumbersome user interface necessitated a minimum of two man hours every week just to record time in SAP. Delayed time entries led to a dip in the employee productivity, triggered chances for incorrect entries and resulted in longer approval times. Due to this invoicing and receivables were delayed, impacting the billing processes thereby affecting the RoI.
The Solution
The need of the hour was to develop a solution that could be deployed quickly (in weeks and not months) and works across all devices (web/mobile/tablets).
The appsFreedom team consulted with the client to understand their unique business needs of their mission critical application and came out with a streamlined time management process. The solution is to build a device agnostic app for “time capture and approvals” enabling the mobile workforce that was not always in front of a laptop to record or approve. appsFreedom designed an app that enabled faster timesheet approvals which included a desktop version that can be accessed from anywhere without the need for a VPN (Virtual Private Network). appsFreedom’s model-driven architecture based platform enabled the client and the appsFreedom team to arrive at a solution by re-envisioning the entire time recording process where user experience is at its paramount. The outcome was a user interface that managed all the complexities behind the scenes, was simple and intuitive and hid the unnecessary fields and dynamically defaulted values based on field selection.
Armed with a solution that allows logging time effectively with dynamic capabilities to create favorites and list customization, employees were able to submit timesheets in real time from anywhere using either a mobile device and/or a browser without logging into VPN. This capturing of accurate data in real time drastically reduced the time recording process from 2 hours to 15 minutes leading to a faster approval process and optimized billing cycles. Fortified with accurate data QSI team were able to reliably forecast the project status and streamline requirements for additional resources.
The Business Benefits
Cross Platform Compatibility
The app was deployed on all Smartphones, Tablets and Web. The app is designed in a way that in spite of the many back-end SAP customizations appsFreedom platform was able to integrate very easily to SAP, resulting in a reduction in time-to-deploy without any need for additional back-end integration coding.
Faster Deployment with Lower Costs
appsFreedom deployed this solution 70% faster with 70% deployment cost savings as compared to any other available option in the market. In comparison to other tools appsFreedom’s solution enabled the client to deploy 70% faster with >70% cost savings. While other tools took >6 months with 4-5 developers to deploy a solution, appsFreedom deployed the solution within 6 weeks with just 3 developers.
Higher Accuracy
With an app to optimize and automate the whole process, the accuracy levels improved and the scope for manual errors was reduced extensively. With complete process automation and real time data availability the client was able accurately forecast the project status and streamline requirements for additional resources.