Bright Yellow Group PLC incorporating Bright
Yellow Solutions and Footprint Training is one of the countries
most innovative private home care providers offering a
comprehensive range of NVQ backed training for all their care
workers and employing the latest rostering and electronic
monitoring solutions to help maximise the performance of the
business.
Bright Yellow Group has two offices; the Head Office and
training centre in Reading which provides home care for Hampshire,
Bracknell and Wokingham councils and the Banbury Office for
servicing home care in Oxfordshire.
With an annual turnover of £2.75 million, the company currently
employs 160 care workers across all Council contracts, carrying out
approximately 5000 visits per week. In addition there are 14 office
based support staff in Head Office and a further 6 in Banbury.
Bright Yellow Group is unique in giving comprehensive training
to care workers before they start work. Gaynor Brown, Projects
Director, sees this as being one of the key selling points for the
business.
Gaynor joined Bright Yellow Group two years ago and remembers
that, although the company had a great team of well trained care
workers and support staff, managing the business was problematic.
'We had a rostering software programme when I started with Bright
Yellow but it didn't properly meet the needs of the business, it
was difficult to use and technical support was inadequate'.
She continues, 'I come from a software development background and I
was new to the industry so I started looking for something that
would fully satisfy all our requirements and was easy to use. So, I
did a lot of research on the internet and looked at all kinds of
solutions including Bar Coding'.
'Then I attended the Ceretas Annual Conference in 2005 and at
the accompanying exhibition got talking to both rostering and
monitoring suppliers. Once I realised that web based solutions were
available that made the decision of choosing suppliers easy.
Anything that's web based for me is the answer because it means I
can access information anywhere and at any time.'
Gaynor is convinced that as well as properly qualified care
workers, 'technology is the catalyst for good service delivery
because you can't be there all the time making sure service
delivery is actually happening when and where it is supposed
to'.
All this happened at the time that Bright Yellow Group won their
Oxfordshire contract, a condition of which was the use of CM2000's
CallConfirmLive!, monitoring solution. So the company implemented a
new rostering system and monitoring almost in parallel.
The whole implementation start to finish took two/three months
and went very smoothly. Gaynor says, 'we had a few teething
problems but nothing that impacted on the day to day running of the
business. 'We went live with rostering, had training with CM2000
and went live with monitoring three to four weeks later. During
this time the interface between CallConfirmLive! and our rostering
solution was written and tested and it all worked brilliantly.'
With Webroster and CallConfirmLive! now successfully implemented
in the Banbury office, Gaynor is planning to introduce
CallConfirmLive! in the Reading office from April 2007. She says,
'I anticipate implementation in the Reading office should take just
two or three weeks because we know the systems work and also what
settings we need to use for our business.'
Gaynor believes that the business cannot operate effectively
without electronic monitoring. 'You can send people out to monitor
care delivery standards but the expense of that is prohibitive.
Margins are low; it is false economy to spend significant amounts
of money or use precious manpower on that kind of activity,
particularly when the results are rarely definitive'
Gaynor continues, 'we are still running the Reading office
without monitoring so I have experience of the comparison between
an office using the system and an office not using the system. Just
think about the thousands of visits you have to verify at the end
of each month or week using a paper based system. This is done
automatically for you using CallConfirmLive! and frees up staff
time to do other things. In addition, all invoicing and billing is
accurate. We employ less people at our Banbury office because we do
not need them and this is mainly due to the technology we use. Once
we have monitoring working in our Reading office I will be able to
re-deploy staff to other activities.'
'From a Quality Assurance point of view, everything you can take
from the monitoring data is added value; improved invoicing,
significantly less paper generation and excellent management
information. The use of management information produced by
CallConfirmLive! is critical to helping maximise performance.
CM2000's suite of reports is excellent and allows comparisons
across all areas of the business. For example, comparing the
performance of individual care workers. Using CallConfirmLive! we
have achieved 98% compliance for care workers in our Banbury
office.'
Gaynor is convinced that, CallConfirmLive! has saved the
business money in various ways. 'The cost of our combined rostering
and monitoring systems per visit is a few pence, it would cost you
more than this for one telephone call to make sure your care worker
has made the visit. The system saves you at least the money you're
spending on it and I would double that in terms of savings to the
bottom line. That's why we need CallConfirmLive! in our Reading
office. We save money on QA, administration and by only
paying for actual work done.'
Gaynor concludes, 'I have the added peace of mind of knowing I
am using a leading technology provider "best of breed" if you like.
The support you get from CM2000 is exceptional, you only have to
make one call and they respond immediately.'
'We are hoping using CallConfirmLive! will give us an advantage
when tendering for new council contracts. In Oxfordshire we are the
number one providers for ETMS compliance. We include this
information when responding to tenders. CallConfirmLive! will also
be a major component in managing outcome based home care delivery
that many Local Authorities are moving towards.'
Finally, Gaynor's advice to other home care providers
considering using monitoring - 'Electronic monitoring should not be
thought as a cost to your business but a saving, both financial and
manpower. If you look at the cost per visit, you will probably be
surprised. Also, there is relatively no 'pain' to go through for
implementation of this system, no matter how daunting the system
may look initially. Providers do not need to be that technically
advanced to implement monitoring and operate it - It's very
straight forward to use. All providers can benefit regardless of
their size. There is real value for the small provider as well as
larger providers.'