Spectrum Care's iconic sunflower image speaks volumes. It represents their vision for people with disabilities and autism spectrum disorders to grow, stand tall and be proud as they make safe, healthy lifestyle choices with the support of Spectrum Care and its partners in the community.

Spectrum Care supports over 400 people living in 85 residential homes, and the infrastructure hub of people and services that makes it happen is considerable.

They needed a SharePoint platform that would support greater information sharing, wider reporting and easier day-by-day operational decisions.

As is the case with any well run business, the solution needed to deliver value for money and tick all the boxes for functionality, meeting a fixed timeframe, at a fixed price. The vehicle to do it was SharePoint, using Intergen's Rapid Results for SharePoint solution.

The pain
The intranet, dubbed Merlin, has received plenty of good feedback. Dashboard reporting is a highly used tool and gives access to a number of measures including residency occupancy, outcome plans, medication statistics, and key worker reports, leading to the faster resolution of problems and better decision making and forecasting.

"Spectrum Care has staff at our Head Office and over 85 other sites, so remote access to SharePoint for communication, information and other operational purposes is a major outcome for our organisation.  Going forward, we are looking to leverage SharePoint and Business Intelligence opportunities and enhanced integration with our Dynamics NAV platform, deliver the "must-have requirements of document management, an intranet and a working SharePoint platform as a foundation for future growth, all in a short timeframe and at a fixed price."

When Intergen saw Spectrum Care's wish list for information sharing, benchmarking, timely communication, dashboard highlights, knowledge measurement, resource optimisation and the need to move towards a paperless regime over time, they thought, "Here is a solution that can deliver real, tangible results.

The direction sat well with Spectrum Care's Head of Finance, Kim Casey. She comments: "We were impressed with Microsoft's long term plan for SharePoint and its continuous improvement and scope for the future. Intergen was very professional in their approach and focused on agreed goals and results. Their thoroughness and commitment to meeting our requirements was excellent and the result was a very smooth, uneventful and prompt delivery of a project on time and on budget."

Dashboards, data, and other dynamics. Spectrum Care now has a friendly intranet interface for staff to access policy and procedure documents, update data and reports.

The gain
Spectrum Care's enhanced capacity to share information across the organisation has increased its ability to be responsive and `person-centered' in meeting the needs of their service users.

The sharing of documents was stymied by manual processes and Spectrum Care needed to equip their staff with a more timely, efficient and responsive way of sharing and acting on operational information.

Rapid Results gets an organisation up to speed quickly. Intergen had recently launched an innovative way of approaching Microsoft SharePoint solutions quickly and inexpensively: Rapid Results.

The bottom line is more bang for less bucks. It's a strategy made possible by developing an out-of-the-box approach and saying, "Yes we can".

> Intergen
W: www.intergen.co.nz

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