IT Services for Healthcare
A healthcare strategic supply chain company is growing rapidly and needs IT advice and support.
Case Study: Yankee Alliance
The Context
As companies grow from having a small team to a larger, more structured organization, their technology support needs go beyond the capacity of part-time internal people, but they can't justify having highly technical engineers as full-time employees. A professional IT services company, such as All Covered, brings many years of experience to the table and can provide access to deep technical skills as needed.
The Client
Founded in 1984, and headquartered in Andover, MA, Yankee Alliance, Inc, and Affiliates is a not-for-profit regional group purchasing and shared services organization serving 55 acute care hospital members nationally. The organization's mission is to reduce member hospitals' costs through increased buying power and improved processes. Beyond purchasing, Yankee Alliance members benefit from best-practice applications and knowledge transfer initiatives generated through the collaborative process that Yankee Alliance has developed over more than two decades. The organization currently employs more than 50 people, including a number of remote and mobile users.
All Covered Support
10 years ago, when Yankee Alliance had around 20 employees, it was doing its own internal IT support. Terry Hall, MCP, Systems Manager, recalls that, "we knew we needed to get some external help, and that's when we engaged All Covered. We haven't looked back since."
As the organization's success grew, so did its staffing and IT needs. All Covered helped both in supporting the expanding number of users and in providing guidance and expertise in terms of technology choices along the way. Terry commented that, "All Covered has helped us make good strategic decisions about our IT infrastructure and then deployed a large part of the agreed upon solutions." These have included projects to virtualize servers and to add a terminal server based network. The day-to-day tasks are well looked after too. As Terry mentioned "We love that our All Covered engineering team has so much experience with other businesses. Anything we think about doing they already have experience in, so we don't make simple mistakes in our IT decisions. All Covered brings best practice solutions to the table to assure things get done right the first time."
In 2008, a team, lead by Chuck Manning, Senior VP of Finance, developed an IT Strategic Plan for Yankee Alliance to ensure that the organization's long term business objectives would be supported by its IT infrastructure. The plan identified four strategic pillars that were adopted by senior management covering virtualization, business intelligence, an intranet based on Microsoft SharePoint and a CRM solution using Microsoft Dynamics. Chuck commented that "having formulated an IT strategic plan has helped us stay focused and on track. All Covered both assisted us with the plan design and in the implementation of specific phase one goals." For example, Yankee Alliance now has nine virtual servers running across three physical devices, together with a Storage Area Network.
All of this makes Yankee Alliance feel that they have IT systems that are very capable of supporting their current and future needs.
“We love that our All Covered engineering team has so much experience with other businesses”
Terry Hall, MCP
Systems Manager, Yankee Alliance
www.yankeealliance.com
