Alters- und Pflegeheim Steinfeld – Outsourcing with 360° desktop.

Starting point. 

An SME in the healthcare sector is confronted with manifold framework conditions, such as ever-increasing cost pressures, increasing admin and care needs and wide-ranging demands of the canton, health insurance companies and others. Despite these conditions, it is essential to achieve the highest service level possible for a reasonable price. In order to be able to permanently fulfil these requirements, the Steinfeld Retirement and Nursing Home had put their trust in the targeted use of IT for many years, which had manifested itself as 44 IT-supported workstations and the use of a wide-range of applications. Alongside the classic Office and accounting tools, this also included dedicated software for nursing records and rotas plus the use of a resident classification and invoicing system.
 

Project objectives.

Steinfeld Retirement and Nursing Home relied on their own on-premise IT infrastructure, but this became a burden over time. The environment had grown organically over the years and was no longer able to fulfil the growing requirements. Obsolete hardware, increasing outages, costs that couldn’t be planned for, gaps in security gaps and support bottlenecks meant that the IT was no longer a benefit, but a burden. On top of all of this, system maintenance required a lot of internal effort and used up resources that were needed for other tasks. With this background, it was clear the IT needed a new footing.

Process.

Two concepts were put forward to replace the existing IT infrastructure. On the one hand, setting up and operating their own, modern on-premise IT infrastructure and on the other, outsourcing the entire infrastructure. Outsourcing with 360° cloud was found to be the best solution: by outsourcing our IT, Steinfeld were now able to benefit from a high-performance, always-on IT infrastructure platform tailored to the company’s needs—for a manageable up-front investment and easy-to-budget monthly fee.

Solution.

Thanks to the implemented outsourcing strategy, IT has turned from a burden into a benefit, says Lars Weissbart, Managing Director, Steinfeld Retirement and Nursing Home: “We are now able to fully concentrate on our core business. Our locally installed workstations consist of ThinClients (IGEL) and docking stations, HP monitors and printers and are convenient, modern, highly-available and are perfect for our Green IT approach. All other components such as the server, applications, backup systems and security components are run in Bechtle’s, our outsourcing partner, data centre. They have taken on operation and maintenance of the entire infrastructure, and offer secure and powerful data communication with our locally installed IT workstations via an MPLS connection. The convenient customer portal means that we can assign and manage employee-specific access permissions among other things.”
 

Business benefits.

Lars Weissbarth also views the standardised workstations with identical hardware and software versions and high scalability of the solution as crucial: “We can, for example, add new workstations anytime we need to—at a clearly defined, budgetable cost and with minimum effort. The outsourcing model we selected also makes it easier than ever before to integrate new applications and features.” Lars Weissbarth uses the example of secure remote access to e-mail, data and applications and how it is available for a select group of people.

The fact that the Steinfeld Retirement and Nursing Home is delighted with its tailored 360° cloud solution is the result of the professionalism shown during the project. “We backed the right horse when we chose Bechtle”, confirms Lars Weissbarth on their choice of cloud partner. “The many years of experience, strong customer orientation and wide-ranging expertise were very clear during the project. A detailed inventory, joint development of requirements as well as the highly-committed project leads all meant that we were able to implement the migration project within a very short time period without causing any interruptions to our operations. All in all, an excellent result.”