How many supporting systems should every NDIS service provider have? This isn’t just a question for those starting out by the way. Organisations that have been around many decades are facing this same issue, it’s just that they may have the added burden of ‘data migration’. More on that later.
Getting things done
Before I jump into the care sector, let’s have a look at the larger corporate world. Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time at a large corporate will know that they are afflicted with system fatigue. It’s not uncommon to hear about a large ‘system rationalisation’ program periodically with larger organisations where they attempt to reduce 300 systems to 30.
This is typically how they end up there. As part of a large organisation, you are given tools that you need to use. These may be super specialised or ‘off the shelf’, but at some stage there will be gaps that you must deal with. This is when additional systems are brought in to solve the problem. Multiply this scenario with a disparate workforce and the next thing you know you have 300 systems used by the organisation.
Key Systems
The dream is that you have a system that does everything for you at the level you require. The reality is that this system doesn’t exist so please stop looking for it now. For a care provider, the ‘problems’ that you most likely want to solve are around the following:
- Plan and record what our frontline staff do – ERP
- Keep track of the services we provide to our customers – Care Management/Health Records
- Pay our staff and manage our P&L – Payroll/Finance
- Communicate to our customers – CRM
- Manage and maintain our compliance – Quality Management System
There are other systems I haven’t listed but they depend on the type of services and scale of your offerings. Rest assured, that there are systems that solve multiple of these problems for you.
When should you systemise?
In large corporates, the process of creating a business case hinges on the value (time/cost savings) that implementing a system has on the business i.e. ‘direct’ benefits. For smaller businesses, this is not always the case. The indirect benefits are just as important.
It’s not just the things that you do with high repetition or of high value that needs to be systemised – it’s also about your employee experience. One of the common factors for employee retention is ‘do I have the right tools to do my job?’ Job satisfaction oozes out into the frontline and has a direct impact on your customer base. Especially in the care sector.
Getting clear on what you need and want
Ultimately, you will embark on the journey to acquire a new system. One of the ways to be clear on what you need is to effectively measure the options against a list of requirements. This is standard practice for large corporates who may even put out a tender to fairly assess potential options.
For those not familiar with this, let me explain. Requirements is a list of the things you need the system to do e.g., support the import of our existing data. After you have your list of requirements, you then need to prioritise the list as not every item you have listed is of equal importance to your organisation. A simple, ‘Mandatory’ or ‘Optional’ will suffice, but this will help you weed out any arguments internally beforehand and avoid wasting time looking at systems that don’t cover the basics that you need.
