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

