Schumacher Group Maintains a 30 Percent Annual Growth Rate with Salesforce and the Force.com Platform

“Force.com is an excellent solution for us to embrace, as we have employees who need access to on-demand applications but do not require CRM. It is critical for us to be able to focus on innovation, and the Force.com platform allows us to do exactly that.”


Challenge
  • Schumacher Group--one of the largest and fastest growing emergency medicine practice management companies in the United States--needed a platform that would allow it to maintain its 30 percent annual growth rate.
  • A home-grown operations database built in Microsoft Access and migrated to SQL lacked relational information.
  • Any solution had to meet stringent Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements.
  • The company also wanted a solution it could deploy quickly, customize to fit the business, and integrate with existing systems.

Solution
  • Schumacher Group selected salesforce.com over Microsoft, Siebel, and Saleslogix for its flexible, on-demand platform; Successforce Consulting services; and partnerships with third-party integrators.
  • With help from salesforce.com partner Astadia, Schumacher Group deployed Salesforce Enterprise Edition in four months to users in sales and marketing; the company quickly added users in credentialing and recruiting and currently has over 200 users on Salesforce.
  • A year later, Schumacher Group upgraded to Salesforce Unlimited Edition to gain access to unlimited custom tabs, Sucessforce Premier Support, and Salesforce Mobile.
  • With training provided by Successforce Education, users learned to use the Apex programming language to extend Salesforce and take advantage of the Force.com platform.
  • New applications such as SchuView—which houses solutions for recruiters and credentialers—are easily built using Apex; Force.com Sandbox serves as a training ground during development.
  • Salesforce Mobile allows road warriors to access vital Salesforce data on Blackberry devices.
  • Using the Cast Iron Appliance, Schumacher Group integrated Salesforce with its PeopleSoft system, ensuring physicians are paid correctly and on time.
  • By integrating Salesforce with its Tangiers Physician Scheduling system, the company can match physician schedules to the actual number of hours worked.
  • Cisco computer telephony integration (CTI) empowers recruiters and schedulers speaking to physicians with information that resides in Salesforce-such as how many times that physician has been called, and how long it takes to initiate a call.
  • Force.com AppExchange apps such as the Apttus Contract and Proposal Suite, Clicktools, and Crystal Reports deliver even more functionality to the platform.

Results
  • Reports are easy to generate and enable executives to quickly identify problem areas.
  • Data quality has vastly improved as a result of moving to Salesforce.
  • With the Force.com platform and Apex, Schumacher Group can easily write and deploy applications to meet its continued growth.
  • The company will customize its application user interfaces with Visualforce to boost productivity and user adoption.
 
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