Integria Healthcare brings together the best names in natural medicine to deliver health professionals and retailers a trusted suite of herbal, nutritional and complementary healthcare products.
Headquartered in Eight Mile Plains, Brisbane, Integria Healthcare has offices in Warwick, Sydney, Perth, Auckland, and Singapore. The business has close to 300 employees.
Complex customer account applications
“From beginning to end, it could take several hours per batch. Ten to fifteen account applications submitted to us accounted for four to six hours of administrative time from already busy finance staff.” - Jairo Garcia | Head of Information Technology, Integria.
Due to its reputation for excellence, Integria Health has a steady flow of account applications from health professionals and retailers keen to offer its products to their customers. Manually processing and approving each application was frustratingly complex.
To open an account, a prospective customer entered their data into a web application, where it was captured in Excel, saved to SharePoint, and then downloaded. A finance team member would then perform a credit check manually. Once the check was completed, the spreadsheet was re-uploaded to SharePoint for approval. Finally, the applicant’s data was entered manually into Integria Healthcare’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations ERP. While the process was undoubtedly thorough, it was slow, inefficient and cumbersome.
“Processing a batch of just four to five account applications from new customers was a time-intensive and convoluted exercise,” says Jairo Garcia, Head of Information Technology for Integria Healthcare.
Adopting user-centric solution approach
Garcia asked Fusion5, their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations partner, to help by replacing a process that spanned five different systems with a seamless portal solution built using Microsoft Power Pages and Power Automate.
Fusion5 had already delivered several innovative and successful Integria Healthcare portal projects – including an education, advice, and documentation portal for practitioners – and had leveraged AI (artificial intelligence) to significant effect for the business. Naturally, the Fusion5 team was delighted to help transform the manually intensive application process for the better.
“It was obvious that we could improve on what we had,” says Garcia. “Our integrations connected our systems, not our processes – so we relied on manual intervention to complete the workflow. This defeated the whole purpose of having integrations. We looked at the problem with fresh eyes and decided we needed a sustainable solution that required minimal time to use and maintain."
“We took a user-centric approach to the design. I think that putting the business user in the front seat was part of the success of the new solution. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we used the old solution as a starting point and asked our Subject Matter Experts what they would like to do differently this time around. We involved them heavily in the testing to make sure it lived up to expectations – and again, I think this significantly contributed to the solution's success and ensured that all-important team buy-in."
I don’t think our testers realised how much time they’d have to devote to the project, but it reinforced their level of commitment to making the solution a long-term success.
A successful partnership
Garcia says that Fusion5 helped them put together the pieces of the equation. “The combination of the knowledge of our functional users and Fusion5’s expertise led to this application's success.”
“Fusion5’s ability to understand our problem and come up with a solution was excellent. I really liked that they took a functional rather than a technical approach to the issue. That aligned well with our own philosophy that the technology needed to support and automate our desired workflow, not dictate it. We took an agile approach to developing the solution – testing it and then proving it every step of the way. This helped our staff members review what they thought they needed at the prototype stage so we could make changes and refinements as the project progressed. So, by the time we went live, everyone was happy with how it worked – there were no surprises.”
A (blisteringly) fast business outcome
Integria Healthcare’s dedication to the project paid off - dramatically. The time it took members of the finance team to process a batch of customer account applications plummeted from two hours to around ten minutes. This means it takes a mere 20-30 minutes a week to manage and approve applications instead of four to six hours.
It was a very collaborative project. Our team was curious about the solution development, so instead of just ‘failing’ a test, they wanted to know what was happening. Fusion5’s consultants were always happy to jump onto a phone call or chat on Teams with our testers to discuss why something wouldn’t work. Often, issues could be resolved on the spot without going through another round of testing. I really appreciated the business acumen and availability of Fusion5’s consultants and their willingness to work collaboratively."
What's next?
Garcia also plans to work with Fusion5 on a self-service portal to reduce the need to raise support tickets and provide staff members with on-the-spot information via a knowledge library. This project is currently at the proof-of-concept stage.
“Offering self-service will streamline how quickly our staff can get help or update their information,” says Garcia, “and make us more efficient by reducing the need for manual intervention. It will be another win-win outcome.”
