Put an end to documents floating around

It Heimstätte Bärau, elderly and disabled people receive care and nursing, but also participate in structures of the most diverse work and employment offers in the areas of agriculture and forestry, gastronomy, gardening, creative workshops, laundry, housekeeping and technical services. In order for the organisation, with its approximately 470 employees, to be able to provide the high quality of the diverse offers, a functioning quality management system is required, which takes into account the special structure of the Heimstätte Bärau with its various affiliated businesses. Like other nursing and care organisations, Heimstätte Bärau is also faced with the permanent challenge of meeting the increasing demands on quality and at the same time reconciling the high level of quality with business aspects. On the one hand, the demands on quality certificates are increasing by law, while at the same time financial resources are becoming scarcer. On the other hand, market conditions are changing because, for example, people with disabilities are living longer today than in the past and care organisations are therefore confronted with increasingly complex, costly care and nursing situations. This leads to constantly evolving organisational structures and an increased need for a cross-functional view of business processes. Care and employment companies therefore have a greater need than ever for open systems that integrate all issues such as quality, occupational safety, environmental protection and risk management.

Central, integrated system

In the course of a reorganization with new business units and responsibilities, it was decided to adapt quality management to the new circumstances with the aim of centrally bundling the system, which had previously been distributed among various units. With this change in content, a technological renewal was also decided upon: In order to create an open platform that could also be further developed for the affiliated companies, the 2013 version of the Microsoft Sharepoint collaboration software was to be used with the best currently available means. "Sharepoint is particularly suitable for this purpose with the aid of the visualisation solution Visio, because process maps can be easily mapped and associated documents, such as work instructions or checklists, can be published," says Daniel Brunner, Head of Marketing and Quality Management System Services and the project manager responsible for the introduction of the new system. In addition to the fact that the Heimstätte was undergoing a process of change and needed to renovate its quality management system, it was also due for recertification of its management system in accordance with ISO 9001 and OHSAS 18001, for which the new application had to be ready for use by the audit date. Brunner, whose position was newly created, redefined the process map, examined and adapted the process structures and hierarchies and the individual management, core and support processes. For its part, the Sursee-based Microsoft Gold Partner IOZ was responsible for the development and implementation of the new concept in the project, which today fully meets the requirement of a consistent process orientation of the system.

Central system

"A certain process orientation was already in place before the introduction of the new system, but the processes often stopped at the boundaries of the departments," says Brunner. This led to the creation of new processes for certain services that could have been easily integrated into existing processes. "Business processes had already been defined in the individual operations beforehand. However, these were not consistently oriented towards the client, but were still too much oriented towards the structure of the company organization. As a result, employment, support and care were not necessarily working to the same standards all the time." The holding and maintenance of information about residents was also done in different places because of the historical structure. For example, the employment department sometimes lacked knowledge of any necessary information from the residential department that would be relevant to agogic care. "Because of the departmental thinking, the exchange of information between the individual areas could not function to the necessary extent," says Brunner. This was because the necessary process links were missing in different places, which would have enabled the standard flow of information between the different areas. Employees had to struggle to get the information they needed. "The exchange of information and thus the assurance of standards and service quality was thus often exclusively dependent on the will and understanding of the employees."

Understand the functional idea of Sharepoint

After a basic design was available as a basic structure, IOZ built the management system in Sharepoint. Very quickly, a prototype was available that could be used to work with and gather initial experience. In an iterative process in workshops, the concept was finally refined, appropriate adjustments made and implemented. The development of the system began at the beginning of 2013 and took around three months. Starting in the second quarter, Brunner worked together with the process owners to migrate existing processes, add new ones, adapt them where necessary and map them in Visio. Seventeen process owners were responsible for defining the processes. Depending on the situation, they involved other internal experts, for example on the basis of their specialist knowledge, but also process customers and internal suppliers. "It is important that the people involved have knowledge of the functionalities of SharePoint as well as an understanding of the application possibilities of the software in addition to process thinking," says Brunner. For this reason, he made targeted investments in training and education and thus achieved that the functional range of Sharepoint could be brought into line with the business processes. With this functional business process management, his goal was for all processes to have a graphical flow. "Even though we are still in a development process with the mapping of the process landscape, there is now definitely an end to documents lying around in different versions on computers or floating around on the intranet," Brunner is pleased to say. Today, all processes are stored in a central library, along with around 900 connecting documents. A metadata model ensures that they appear in the right place and can be found. Each document can be assigned to several processes with a clean keywording, so that redundancies and duplications no longer occur. In addition, all news and training information is managed centrally on the platform.

Impact on corporate IT and success

Acceptance of the new system is very good one year after the start of productivity, says Brunner. "But it was already the case that, at the beginning, the new process landscape took some getting used to for many." However, with an appealing and easy-to-use graphical design of the interfaces, this could be counteracted well. Today, the individual documents can be adapted by editors who are authorized to do so and released via the process owners. Through the cooperation with IOZ, Heimstätte Bärau has meanwhile built up considerable know-how, so that the customer has the integrated management system under control with the installed solution, largely independent of the supplier. However, the solution also has a technological impact on other applications, to which interfaces are gradually being built. "Sharepoint is becoming part of our core IT system and has gained in importance accordingly," says Brunner, who plans to build the entire intranet on this technology in a further step. In order to move away from using Office documents in the future, entire workflows are to be developed in Sharepoint or bought in, which will then be integrated into the existing system either by the company itself or with the help of IOZ. "Thanks to the integration of Sharepoint, recertification in accordance with the ISO standard has certainly become easier for us," says Brunner. "But in particular, the system makes a significant contribution to increasing the efficiency and quality of our services and thus improving our competitiveness."