HammondCare

HammondCare has more than 4,500 staff and 1,100 volunteers providing care to over 28,000 people in 60 locations. If offers hospital care, residential care, and community services and has a strong focus on dementia care, palliative care and research. It also leads a partnership with Dementia Support Australia, which provides a national dementia consultancy services funded by the Australian Government.

The summary

Industry:

Aged Care

Country:

Australia

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Business Challenge:

HammondCare needed to modernise and improve the overall maturity of their IT support operations and reduce the reliance on temporary contractors for their in-house IT support team and help desk.

Solution:

Brennan implemented Managed Service Desk and Enhanced Desktop solution combined with an award-winning Service Now portal to provide self-service capabilities for internal staff with added Business Intelligence to assist decision-making and resourcing.

Results:

Brennan provided HammondCares’ 4500 staff with a streamlined self-service IT support and help desk process. The solution was implemented on time and ahead of schedule – almost 100% remotely due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

“Technology is ubiquitous everywhere; we are starting to see a lot more innovation and digitisation in our sector. Having a partnership with a leading managed services provider such as Brennan to support all our front line staff 24/7 is critical.”

Jose A. Perez, Chief Information Officer, HammondCare

“The success of the HammondCare relationship is underpinned by Brennan’s expertise in Managed Services and the ability to deliver exceptional customer experience between the two organisations.”

Nick Sone, Chief Customer Officer, Brennan

The Situation

When HammondCare, one of Australia’s most innovative health and aged care providers, decided to outsource their IT support, they were impressed by the maturity of Brennan’s services capability, its collaborative and agile approach, and its focus on client satisfaction.

Despite the challenges presented by Covid, Brennan delivered a seamless transition to its outsourced solution in less than 6 weeks, and immediate benefits to HammondCare, including a vastly improved user support experience, mature ITIL support processes & governance, and enhanced BI data and analytics.

In outsourcing to Brennan, HammondCare has been able to transition to a highly advanced, best practice IT support operation – a combination of people, processes, and systems – that would take years to develop in-house, in a matter of months. The service will scale as HammondCare grows, and importantly, it will allow HammondCare to focus more time and resources on delivering a strategy of innovation in healthcare.

The Challenge

A period of sustained business growth had begun to place increasing pressure on the in-house IT support team and Helpdesk and a need to move to a 24/7 support operation. This was exacerbated by challenges in recruiting permanent support staff, which had left the Helpdesk under-resourced and often relying on temporary contractors. In addition, there was a need to modernise the IT Service Management platform, improve the overall maturity of the IT support operation.

These challenges, combined with HammondCare’s keenness to innovate, ultimately led to the decision to build applications expertise in-house, and to outsource IT Support. This would free up internal staff to focus on application innovation and ultimately, improving patient care.

HammondCare subsequently went to market with the objective of selecting a flexible and agile Managed Service partner with strong capability and a proven track record in IT support.

The Solution

Brennan’s approach to the tender process was not simply to submit a pre-defined solution based on a one-size-fits-all service level agreement but to engage HammondCare in a series of workshops to understand the challenges and create a tailored support model aligned to the needs of the business and its staff.

To help alleviate the immediate resourcing issues on the Helpdesk, Brennan placed two of their own Service Desk agents into the HammondCare team, who quickly demonstrated Brennan’s culture of strong work ethic and technical expertise.

It is this collaborative, solution-oriented, and agile approach that has become a hallmark of Brennan and ultimately saw HammondCare award them a multi-year Managed Services contract.

Underpinning the support service, Brennan implemented Managed Service Desk and Enhanced Desktop solution combined with an award-winning Service Now portal to provide self-service capabilities for internal staff. With added Business Intelligence for detailed reporting, analytics, and insights into support ticket data, to assist with decision-making and resourcing.

The Result

Despite having to deliver and implement this new solution almost 100% remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the entire project ran seamlessly, resulting in on budget and ahead-of-schedule transitions for HammondCare with no disruptions to day-to-day business.

Safety of the residents and staff at all HammondCare locations, always a priority, had become much more critical during the pandemic and both teams worked tirelessly to ensure no additional risks were introduced by the project.

“Although the transition happened in the background, the results were almost immediate, with anecdotal comments coming in from all parts of the business, remarking on how fast and helpful the help desk had become, literally overnight,” says Jose A. Perez, Chief Information Officer at HammondCare.

Nick Sone, Sales and Marketing Director at Brennan, believes the success of the HammondCare relationship is underpinned by Brennan’s expertise in Managed Services and the ability to deliver exceptional customer experience between the two organisations.

“Some businesses can struggle to define their core mission, but HammondCare is very clear about their role in the Aged Care industry, their commitment to innovation, and the role they want technology to play in that process. It made it very easy for us to partner with them, align to their innovation agenda and become a part of their high-performance team,” he says.

“We’re very proud of how quickly we were able to lift the service levels right across the organisation and give HammondCare the platform to continue to pursue innovation. We’re very much looking forward to working with them on their technology journey,” he adds.

Case Study