A retail hearing aid startup founded by industry experts needed sharper insight into its clinics than its practice management SaaS could deliver. Techlancer designed and built a custom business intelligence and process improvement web application that produced:
- Increased employee satisfaction
- Reduced manual labor
- Increased revenue
- Better management insight into employee behavior
Problem
Our client was preparing for rapid expansion in the retail hearing aid space across both the US and Canada. Their clinics ran on an industry-leading practice management SaaS application for patient management, appointment scheduling, audiological tests, inventory, and sales — but that system’s reporting was limiting and did not provide insight into some of the key operations within their clinics.
The SaaS solution also could not handle several complicated, company-specific calculations and processes. With years of experience and success running retail audiology clinics, the client was eager to develop a tool that would augment their practice management solution and support the management and growth of their rapidly expanding portfolio.
Solution
Techlancer developed a single custom web application that addressed the client’s core needs:
- Business intelligence: We built a data warehouse that captured data from the practice management solution, transformed it into a reportable structure, and displayed it through configurable, role-specific BI dashboards that combined custom KPI widgets with Power BI reports.
- Motivational tool: We leveraged historical information alongside management-specified goals to present data to end users as easily digestible, motivational metrics — helping to promote growth and process improvement.
- Incentive automation: Automated calculation of complicated employee financial incentives.
Results / Outcomes
- Increased employee satisfaction
- Reduced manual labor
- Increased revenue
- Better management insight into employee behavior
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Business intelligence
- Business process improvement
- Data warehouse design and development (ETL — extract, transform, load)
- Web app development
- User interface design
- Error alerting
- Power BI development
Overview
The application provides:
- Business intelligence dashboards configurable to user role and permissions
- Metric-supporting Power BI reporting
- Motivational tools and goal-driven custom KPIs
- Semi-automated calculators for complicated financial incentive metrics
- Functional enhancements to the SaaS practice management tool
Software Needs Assessment
We met with our client’s key stakeholders to identify the problems they wanted to solve:
- The metrics they wanted to track
- The labor-intensive calculations they wanted to automate
- The information they wanted to use to motivate their team and increase sales
- The limitations of their SaaS practice management system
We were given access to their SaaS data and compared it against the client’s workflow to better understand what the data could tell us. Once we knew what the client was interested in and what the practice management system’s data made available, we brainstormed with the client to identify metrics, reports, and approaches for displaying useful, motivational metrics.
Scoping
Our team reviewed the client’s needs and put together a project scope, along with a timeline and estimated costs.
Development
Our developers began by designing the application — starting with UI/UX design while simultaneously building the ETL process for the data warehouse.
With the design in place and the data in the format we wanted, the team developed the application using an Agile approach, meeting with the client weekly for updates and demonstrations of progress.
Testing
Our team performed extensive testing to ensure the application’s functionality and the accuracy of its custom metrics and reports.
Once development and QA were complete for the required launch scope, we:
- Drafted UAT scripts for the client’s testing team, and
- Offered “office hours” so testers could provide feedback and voice concerns.
Launch
After UAT approval, we:
- Deployed the application to a production environment, and
- Assisted the client in onboarding their staff, providing user support whenever it was needed.
Ongoing Maintenance & Support
We provided support via email and phone, and continued to periodically monitor and update the production and test environments.
Continued Development
After launch, we met with our client to discuss additional functions, metrics, and reports that would benefit their operations — and set out on Phase 2 of the application.
Features
- Business Intelligence
- Business Process Improvement
- Data Warehouse
Technologies
- Azure Data Factory (cloud)
- Azure App Services (cloud)
- Azure Monitor with Application Insights (cloud)
- Microsoft Power BI
- Entity Framework
- C#.Net
- React.js
- Microsoft SQL
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