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Schumacher Group Maintains a 30 Percent Annual Growth Rate with Salesforce CRM and the Force.com Platform
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 platform; Salesforce.com Consulting services; and partnerships with third-party integrators.
- With help from salesforce.com partner Astadia, Schumacher Group deployed Salesforce CRM 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 CRM.
- A year later, Schumacher Group upgraded to Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition to gain access to unlimited custom tabs, Salesforce.com Premier Support, and Salesforce CRM's mobile access.
- With training provided by Salesforce.com Training & Certification, users learned to use Apex to extend Salesforce CRM 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's sandbox testing environment serves as a training ground during development.
- Salesforce CRM's mobile access allows road warriors to access vital Salesforce CRM data on Blackberry devices.
- Using the Cast Iron Appliance, Schumacher Group integrated Salesforce CRM with its PeopleSoft system, ensuring physicians are paid correctly and on time.
- By integrating Salesforce CRM 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 CRM-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 CRM.
- 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 Force.com's pages to boost productivity and user adoption.
For Douglas Menefee, cloud-computing applications, which some people call software as a service (SaaS), is a way of life. The CIO at Schumacher Group, one of the largest and fastest-growing emergency medicine practice management companies in the United States, relies on Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform to deliver the kind of innovation that helps his company maintain its 30 percent annual growth rate. By giving physicians access to Salesforce CRM and Google Apps, Menefee will boost collaboration and efficiency.
What’s your cloud-computing strategy?
Cloud computing takes up approximately 50 to 60 percent of our processes at Schumacher Group. We use Salesforce CRM Sales. We do all our recruiting through the system and are in the process of integrating our Cisco IP telephony system so recruiters can make outbound phone calls from Salesforce CRM using the computer telephony integration tool.
We maintain our relationships with physicians using Salesforce CRM. We get them credentialed with insurance carriers and manage all the credentialing in Salesforce CRM.
How does Salesforce CRM and Google Apps play into this strategy?
Salesforce CRM and Google Apps is directly in line with our cloud computing strategy. We are building a portal to distribute information to the 2,700 physicians we work with. Included in that portal is a document management solution where users can upload a document. We’ve already started writing some hooks into the Google API for documents and architected a little system so that physicians can create a Google document directly from within the portal without having to launch a word processing application.
Once a physician has created a document, someone at Schumacher Group can then pull up that physician’s account and see what other types of documents that person has created, such as best practices or presentations. This allows us to leverage the strengths of group knowledge and apply best practices across the company.
How are Salesforce CRM and Google changing the cloud-computing game?
The important takeaway is that the information is held inside this great container called the Force.com platform. With the flexibility of the Force.com platform, we’re able to take that data and move it into all these different systems either through the Google API or through direct connects inside the applications.
As soon as I heard about Salesforce CRM and Google Apps, I immediately started thinking about how I could tie that back into Salesforce CRM data. In only a couple of weeks, we put together something that would take months of development time using a traditional development approach. That's the power of cloud computing.
How will Salesforce CRM and Google Apps change the way people work at Schumacher Group?
Our physicians are independently contracted to work inside hospitals where they don’t have dedicated PCs. Without a computer, they can’t save files.
With Salesforce CRM and Google Apps, we see real opportunities for collaboration. No matter where they are, users will be able to work and store documents. They’ll be able to share their Google calendar with their spouses. These are the kinds of benefits cloud computing brings to the table.
How else will you use Salesforce CRM and Google Apps?
Salesforce CRM and Google Apps will give everyone better insight into documents being created by physicians. The ability for people to see those docs should help increase collaboration. I also see Salesforce CRM and Google Apps as an excellent business continuity solution in the event our file server goes down or we have a massive virus outbreak. It’s a great failover option for us, too, because it lets us create, store, and build an instant intranet/extranet solution in the unlikely event all our equipment is totally annihilated.
What are the benefits of Salesforce CRM and Google Apps?
Right now, we have to install client software on each PC, so there’s a maintenance issue to consider. Our users want documents that are readable, printable, and transferable. They don’t want software. From the end user’s standpoint, this means that you never have to worry about version control or e-mailing attachments to colleagues. From an administrative standpoint, centralized solutions give you better control and efficiency.