Spitex Zürich Sihl – Focussing on core skills with 360° desktop.

Starting point. 

Spitex Zürich Sihl’s 393 employees are confronted by manifold framework conditions – constantly changing cost pressure, increasing administration, care, support demands, and conditions imposed by the awarding authority, the City of Zurich. Optimisation needed to be continually identified in order to perform the tasks to the full satisfaction of over 3,000 customers.

More stability, availability, and security. Spitex Zürich Sihl had previously run and performed maintenance of their own, on-site data centre. This was becoming more difficult and time consuming as time progressed. "Our environment had grown organically over the years and was no longer sufficient for our growing needs,” says Simon Lutz, Head of Finance and Accounting at Spitex Zürich Sihl. "Outdated hardware, multiple system failures, unforeseeable costs, security vulnerabilities and support bottlenecks all meant our IT was uneconomical and unreliable. Maintenance of the system meant a great deal of internal effort and taking resources away from our core responsibilities, making the situation worse. It was high time to find a new foundation for our IT.”

Project objectives.

There were two concepts that needed to be discussed to replace the old IT infrastructure: on the one hand, the badly-needed improvements in continued on-site operation of their own, modern IT infrastructure, and on the other hand, outsourcing their entire information and communication technology. Full outsourcing had clearly proved itself as the better option,” says Simon Lutz: “By outsourcing our IT, we’re now able to benefit from a high-performance, always-on IT infrastructure platform tailored to our needs – for a manageable up-front investment and easy-to-budget monthly fee.”

Process.

Introducing the new software, SWING, proved to be very demanding, because this meant an end to planning resources with a board and a switch to electronic planning on computers combined with the assurance of high performance and numerous clarifications with the software’s supplier. A key step was migrating the data centre. The project team created a detailed system design, including a naming concept, organisation, user accounting, rights and access concepts, elimination of technical risks, considering insights from the on-site infrastructure plus collaboration and termination with diverse software suppliers. The migration concept itself consisted of data storage, e-mail service (including an HIN gateway to the neighbouring Spitex organisation in Zurich Limmat), special applications and databases as well as all the data required for the pilot phase.

Solution.

ll expectations met. After a few short but intense months, Simon Lutz talks contentedly about the new setup: “It was definitely worth it. Even if we are now somewhat dependant on Bechtle because of the outsourcing, the expected benefits are clear to see: We no longer need to look after IT hardware, we benefit from clear, budgetable, and manageable IT costs, and our devices like screens and printers have also been standardised. Additionally, we have boosted security dramatically thanks to a highly-stable system, and all this 24/7. Finally, the extra time we have to spend on IT applications has hugely reduced. And the most important aspect: Our 218 IT users are very happy, as are the other employees who work directly on the customers’ sites and get their daily route simply sent to their smartphones.”
 

Business benefits.

Simon Lutz highlights another plus point in the form of the Bechtle customer portal. “Many little requests like unlocking someone's account after they’ve entered an incorrect password three times and opening and mutating users can be done by me, which is a great help,” emphasises Simon Lutz. “It’s also great for customers, and we hardly need the service desk.” When a Spitex centre had to make the switch, they found out how flexible and powerful cloud solutions really are. “In general we are happy to be able to count on a reliable partner in Bechtle. They enabled us to quickly and easily respond to developments in our environment. Security and sustainability are the foundation that we will build on in the future,” says Simon Lutz, in conclusion.