Case Study: Entrust Social Care

To make any case study worthwhile, it needs to highlight one or more salient points about the service that it is intended to illuminate. I'm starting with this particular case study because it demonstrates three important characteristics of well built bespoke software:

1. It has a clear cost benefit.
2. It improves the way in which the client's business is run.
3. It provides management information about the processes that it manages.

The client in this case is Entrust Social Care, whose website can be found at www.entrustsocialcare.co.uk. The Company provides temporary Social Workers (Locums) to the Public Sector across the UK, who in turn approach Entrust to satisfy their staffing requirements. One of the most important parts of Entrust's business is making sure that the locums are paid promptly after submitting their timesheets.

The locums are paid for the hours they work (sometimes working for different clients in the same week), for their expenses and they are also awarded bonuses. In addition to this, they might opt to take time off in lieu. Each week, the MD at Entrust, Ian Brindley, would process the timesheets submitted by the locums, using Excel to calculate the payments and track the time worked against bonus goals. It was a time consuming process and it was what Ian spent the Thursday and Friday of each week doing. It was boring work, yet vitally important, which is a poor combination. Furthermore, Ian didn't feel able to delegate the work out to his staff.

Ian and I had worked together at JPMorganChase in 2000, and he approached me to ask whether Meantime could do anything to help ease his situation. He explained that his business was developing well and that he was generally very happy: the only fly in the ointment was this weekly business with the timesheets. We spent some time talking to Ian about his business, the specific issue and about possible solutions.

This done we then designed a database that would store the details of both Ian's clients and the locums who were working through him. Over this we laid an administration system that would enable Ian to add and maintain this data. We then repeated this process, adding the relationships between the locums and the Social Work Teams in which they were placed.

The next step was to provide Ian with an easy to use interface where he could select a locum, choose a location where they were working and then enter the hours worked, expenses et cetera for a given week. Finally, we provided the function to produce a report of all the payments required for each locum.

As a consequence of this work, using the same inputs and providing the same outputs, we reduced the timesheet processing from two days to two hours (which is how long it took to type in the data). Additionally, we were able to provide valuable data from the system, simply because the relevant part of Ian's operational data was being processed by it. At the press of button Ian could access powerful business information regarding the number of contracts he had in place, the number of clients and locums he had on his books, plus vital financial information.

So, to summarise, let's look at those three points again:

1. The system has a clear cost benefit. Timesheet processing was taking up every Thursday and Friday, i.e. 40% of Ian's working time. Whilst I'm not privy to what Ian pays himself, I know that the cost of the software was less than two-fifths of his salary and, furthermore, it was a one-off cost.

2. The system improves the way in which the client's business is run. Once the system was in place, Ian suddenly had an extra two working days available in his week, something that would be hugely attractive to any Managing Director. This gave him more time to grow his business plus the confidence that he could manage the additional workload.

3. The system provides management information about the processes that it manages. Without even consulting Ian, common sense would have enabled us to provide useful reports to Ian. In addition to those mentioned above, we were in a position to answer questions like Who are my best clients? How much have I paid out to locums this quarter? Which care clients appear to be using more or less of my services over time?

All businesses are different and that is why they need bespoke software for their IT solutions. For those solutions to be effective, the businesses need to pick suppliers who are demonstrably strong when it comes to business analysis: there is a lot of work to be done before the first coding keystroke takes place. The Entrust project is a great example of how, by listening to the client and working with him, we were able to provide a solution that exactly matched his requirement.