Explore our Case studies to learn more about the work we do and our commitment to helping our clients achieve superior operational performance.

Challenge

The Private Equity Foundation (PEF) is a non-profit organisation that works with charities to improve young peoples' lives. A key challenge for PEF was to effectively and efficiently capture relevant information from all the charities it supports, all of whom are located in different places and use an array of management systems.

Approach

• Defining reporting needs and process for capturing the charities information
• Designing a pragmatic solution with the appropriate tools
• Developing a database structure and interactive reporting dashboards for financial and operational management

• Enabling PEF to easily share personalised data reports with member charities

Results and benefits

• Allows for a single source for financial, operational and charity support reporting, improving data availability and quality
• Provides a comprehensive snapshot of charity performance that is easy to understand
• Tracks organisational performance against budgets and the factors that are driving financial trends
• Enables data analytics and outcomes management in a single, easy to use package
• Reduced the data collection and report generation time by more than 50%

Challenge

In the UK, the relationship between Health Care Professionals (HCPs) and pharmaceutical companies is governed by guidelines set out by the ABPI, the trade association of companies producing prescription medicines. These guidelines are regularly reviewed, and Roche amends its procedures and approval policies accordingly. This ensures that company representatives maintain compliant behaviour when conducting promotional activity and that detail records are kept.

Roche wanted to improve existing processes and systems to foster smooth professional relationships. Representatives were finding the new rules and regulations increasingly complicated to manage whilst HCPs were expressing frustration that the process for gaining funding was slower.

Approach

• Defining 'to be' processes that would drive compliance to regulations and would also be workable for the field team
• Designing an online workflow solution to support the new processes and automate decision-making
• Executing a change and adoption management plan to roll out the new solution system across the organisation

Results and benefits

• Successful introduction and roll out - a survey 3 month post launch showed adoption was 100% with a positive satisfaction level >80%
• The number of meetings has increased significantly
• The time employees need to spend on process has reduced - in some cases by 30%
• The levels of employee and customer satisfaction have both risen

Challenge

Monitor, Independent Regulator of Foundation Trusts was established in January 2004 to authorise and regulate NHS foundation trusts. Monitor's role is now expanding under the new Health and Social Care Act and as it grows in size and scope three major knowledge and information challenges arise:

• The increasing quantity of information
• The need to make the right decisions supported by a strong evidence base
• The need for greater efficiency and productivity

Approach

• Migrating the existing SharePoint 2007 'connect2' platform to SharePoint 2010 and integrating it with Monitor's Dynamics CRM system
• Developing a bespoke Microsoft SharePoint 2010 solution
• Creating dashboards using data from warehouse and CRM
• Designing a workflow that supports information capture from NHS trusts and the import into the warehouse

Results and benefits

• 10% productivity improvement in the monitoring process and a faster response to FOI requests
• Information is easily found, trusted, shared and retained with a reduced risk of making inappropriate or untimely regulatory decisions
• Internal communications are more timely and richer
• New joiners are more informed and able to get up to speed more quickly

Challenge

Fairbridge helped 4,000 young people last year take their first step from the brink. The charity is keen to do more but funding has never been harder to find. To attract government funding and to attract other donors, Fairbridge needed to demonstrate the impact and value of its work but this was hard due to:

• Poor consistency in capturing and tracking data as each of the 15 branches had a separate database
• Varying reporting needs from stakeholders that led to disproportionate amount of time spent generating reports
• Dependency risk as there was only one person capable of providing maintenance and support

Approach

• Providing a single, consistent and integrated web based system across the organisation
• Allowing the measurement of both 'soft' and 'hard' outcomes from the support Fairbridge delivers
• Empowering end users to efficiently generate existing new reports

Results and Benefits

• Reduced administrative workload
• Tracking of the effectiveness of programmes - maintaining/improving the quality of support
• Demonstrating the value Fairbridge brings to the donors and stakeholders
• Secured additional funds from a key donor

Challenge

The Government is chasing value for money by changing the way services for young people and families are commissioned: outcomes-based procurement, contracting on the basis of the impact services have on users. To monitor outcome improvements, Sure Start Children's Centres had to:

• Have a set of measures that define families in greatest need
• Be able to collect and collate data on those measures efficiently and effectively
• Determine the distribution of families in greatest across Children centre catchment areas
• Present key data to stakeholders to inform local strategic objectives
• Have robust data as evidence of progress towards outcomes

Approach

• Developing definitions of school readiness and families in greatest need based upon the requirement of local authority commissioning officers
• Collating local data across key sectors including health, education, criminal justice, employment, housing and children's services
• Implementing a low cost and flexible data warehouse to store and update key data from stakeholders
• Creating a performance dashboard capable of pulling key information in a format readily accessible by users

Results and benefits

• All relevant local information in one data warehouse
• Easy production of summary statistics for local Children's Centres, Local Authority policy leads and elected members
• Evidence to drive local strategic priorities for Children's Centres
• Capacity to monitor outcomes that will trigger payments to Local Authorities

Challenge

RSA's global portfolio of business projects creates a strong demand on HR to enhance and accelerate the design of fit-for-purpose organisation structures. RSA needed a tool that could:

• Extract meaningful insight from data
• Create sophisticated reporting
• Work through different scenarios and understand the impact

Approach

RSA chose OrgVue because of its powerful feature such as:

• Compatibility with existing management tools
• Dynamic visual reports
• Reports that are easy to create and understand

Results and benefits

• Reports that are easier to create and 'digest'
• Information are pulled in minutes instead of weeks

Challenge

Wakefield is facing a set of tough challenges. The council is tasked with making savings of £67 million over 4 years and needs to reduce the headcount of senior managers by 28%. To meet these challenges, a change was required in the size and shape of the council and Wakefield needed a way to change, analyse and support organisation design.

Approach

• Delivering tailored data and reports
• Making visualisation of data easy and in real time
• Implementing an effective and efficient change management and organisation redesign
• Providing a self-service model - saving time and promoting employee engagement

Results and benefits

• Visualisation of the changes in the organisation
• Better understanding and management of staff
• Reduced time needed to produce charts and models
• Easier tailoring of data and reports
• HR Business Partners are now available to work alongside managers to analyse all aspects of services

Challenge

The NHS is dedicated to achieving the Government's target of reducing the death by cancer in people under 75. That's no easy task. Cancer is a major health issue in the UK; one in three people will be diagnosed with the disease in their lifetime, and one in four will die of it.

As part of the NHS' original Cancer Plan (2000), a series of cancer 'networks' were set up across England. A cancer network brings together local Primary Care Trusts, in order that commissioning of cancer services may be coordinated across a wider geographical area, as well cancer specialists, health professionals and senior managers involved in the care of cancer patients and their families, therefore enabling a dialogue between commissioners and providers to take place. A network's mission is to achieve better quality treatment and care for cancer patients.

Now these cancer networks have a vital new tool in their mission to develop better ways to fight the disease. The Cancer Commissioning Toolkit (CCT) helps NHS managers, specialists in public health, senior staff within networks and clinicians develop better cancer-fighting strategies at a local level, based on national data and standards.

Approach

• Creating an intuitive user friendly web-based tool
• Designing the toolkit around the patient's pathway or journey through the treatment
• Centralising all the information needed in one place
• Securing that data is accessible via a level of detail hierarchies
• Running a number of formal training sessions and roll out events

Results and benefits

• Improved the decision making abilities of the NHS' cancer specialists
• Brought together commissioning expertise through the guidance contained in the Toolkit
• High-performing organisations are highlighted, supporting the sharing of best practice nationally

Challenge

The speedy treatment of cancer is a major objective of the NHS, with the effective delivery of chemotherapy a key plank in that strategy. But when a major 2004 governmental review found imbalances in what drugs were made available to clinicians across different locales in England, and what the adoption of new drugs was slower in the UK than in the rest of Europe, clearly action needed to be taken.

Approach

• Developing a web-based simulator which is accessible from any web-browser
• Creating a complex simulation logic written in the T-SQL programming language on top of a Microsoft SQL Server database
• Hosting the solution centrally making it easier to maintain

Results and benefits

• Changes to therapies are much more accurate
• Patients are getting shorter waiting lines on their chemotherapy treatment days
• The Government is getting better visibility on resources and a better understanding of variations in drug usage and clinical practices

Challenge

Across England, Hospital Trusts and other parts of the NHS involved in the delivery of radiotherapy as a treatment for cancer have been struggling to model the optimal use of their resources to meet patient demand and National standards in radiotherapy provision.

Such questions as, what would happen if I install another specialised machine 'a linear accelerator' or 'am I making the best use of the skills and time of my oncologists, physicist or therapeutic radiographers' have been extremely difficult to answer.

Approach

• Working in collaboration with three NHS radiotherapy teams and NCAT
• Building a highly sophisticated tool for service improvement and planning
• Developing R-PORT on the same platform as C-PORT and CCT

Results and benefits

• NHS practitioners, administrators and managers can easily investigate patterns and evaluate 'what-ifs'
• R-PORT answer a variety of high priority questions by testing out the impact of any change in resources

Challenge

Novo Nordisk is a Danish-headquartered pharmaceutical organisation, the largest in the area of diabetes treatment, offering as it does a wide range of solutions including some of the world's most advanced insulin delivery systems.

Novo Nordisk's vision of a world map that could be drilled down to regional and then individual country level by visitors to dive them a highly-navigable, responsive way to find out what they need to know on the disease and treatment pathways, was delivered by Concentra.

Approach

• Developing a tool that combines marketing with corporate social responsibility
• Creating a highly interactive informational resource and sales and marketing tool using Microsoft .NET technology

Results and benefits

The map was so successful that it has been incorporated into Novo Nordisk's marketing and education mix.