Case Study - NKF overhauls operations with Microsoft Dynamics
CRM and NAV analytics to provide valuable operational insight
Singapore’s National Kidney Foundation (NKF) has a mission to provide affordable dialysis, health screening and public education to the community. The board of this charitable organization faced a considerable challenge in finding a suite of modern business software to replace a console-based legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The aim of the project was to streamline operations, remove duplicate processes and data, and ultimately improve staff productivity and patient care. Due to the specialist nature of the organization, a highly flexible, customizable solution was required.
Aims
NKF’s IT strategy is focused on using Microsoft technology for all applications to ensure interoperability and consistency. The organization chose a combination of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV to manage its operational processes, covering more than 2,000 patients, 24 dialysis centers, and 600 employees.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM would be highly customized as a clinical system to manage medical patient records, for donor management, and also a complex patient billing system to track a combination of means testing, subsidies, insurance claims, and bad debts. This would ensure that front office staff such as nurses had centralized access to all relevant information for their patients.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV was selected for financial management, primarily accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, purchase orders, and stock control. The two would be integrated, for example patient consumption of drugs recorded in CRM would be passed to NAV for billing. In addition, seven years of legacy data was migrated to NAV, in order to meet statutory requirements. PulseSync was the Microsoft Dynamics partner selected to do the NAV and CRM implementation.
Better visibility into Dynamics data
As IT Director Catherine Goh explained, “An important part of this project was to ensure that we had excellent visibility into the data from these new systems for operational analysis. We wanted to take our transactional data and present it in a way that could tell a powerful story. If data is presented properly, it can greatly enhance decision-making.”
Solution
NKF chose Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and NAV solutions to provide these data analysis capabilities. “We chose Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics because the solutions are based on Microsoft technology which integrates well with our architecture. Also the ability to deploy quickly and build data warehouses easily despite our heavy customizations was attractive. Ultimately we needed a solution that was agile and easy to use,” said Catherine.
Results
End users will have a unified, web-based analytics interface to view operational data. “Users don’t care whether data comes from NAV or CRM – they want a seamless analysis experience,” Catherine said. NKF is providing all department heads, the IT department, and selected power users with management dashboards that provide an overview relevant to that area. The solution will also be used to provide Key Performance Indicators and scorecards for performance management.
Finance analytics were rolled out first, with a focus on cost management reporting, and managing payment recovery in a more systematic way. CRM analytics will provide insight into patient and donor demographics and also patient trends such as hospitalization. “Our primary focus is on operational analytics, but beyond that we plan to work with our medical staff to use the data we collect for medical research to help improve patient care,” Catherine explained.