SUCCESS STORY

The Business: Developing IT Solutions for the Modern Medical Practices

The Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for Cross-Functional Teams on 400 Projects

The Solution: Enact's Internet-based Collaborative Framework

The Results: Simplified Resource Management and Real-time Status for Every Team Member

The Bottomline: Counting on Continued Success for Every Project with the Enact Enterprise System

The Business: Developing IT Solutions for the Modern Medical Practices
Medical Manager Midwest, Inc. is a large distribution and application development firm based in South Bend, Indiana, specializing in the development of custom software for medical practices. The company develops, markets, implements and supports The Medical Manager® physician practice management system, which addresses the financial, administrative, clinical and practice management needs of healthcare providers.

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The Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for Cross-Functional Teams on 400 Projects
In any given week, Tim Liddell, Medical Manager's vice president of operations, oversees 400 software-development projects involving 200 team members. Prior to the company's initial public offering, Medical Manager Midwest was a small entity working out of a single office using Microsoft Project to manage their projects and resources. Within a relatively short period of time and a successful IPO, Tim's organization instantly became a large corporation consisting of 16 offices in 14 states, and was now organized into five districts that each handled approximately 500 clients. As a result, Medical Manager Midwest had quickly outgrown its limited method of managing software development projects.

"It was clear that because we grew so rapidly we needed to adopt a standardization model that would allow us to share our resources, regardless of geographical boundaries", explained Liddell. "Managing our projects using a paper trail and Microsoft Project was entirely too cumbersome-we needed a secure enterprise-level solution that would give team members in various locations the ability to share project plans and output."

Since Medical Manager Midwest was working with many complex configurations and programming changes across five different office districts, it became crucial to integrate a project management solution that would consolidate everything into one information stream, while keeping up with audit trails and daily changes to the workflow. "We discovered that as employees were becoming involved in too many projects, resource-scheduling conflicts became a problem", explained Liddell. "There was no consistent practice for managers and employees working from different districts to communicate and collaborate on project changes, updates, and tasks. The company clearly needed an enterprise-wide project collaboration tool that would proactively keep everyone, at every level of the hierarchy, involved and well-informed."

The company sought a way to keep team members fully up-to-date and on target with their tasks. Equally important was the goal to turn data from disparate systems into meaningful information for making key management decisions.

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The Solution: Enact's Internet-based Collaborative Framework
Medical Manager Midwest turned to the Enact Enterprise System for a Web-based solution that would eliminate their geographical and organizational challenges. Designed specifically for real-time project collaboration across the enterprise, the Enact Enterprise System addressed all of Medical Manager's key requirements.

In addition, the Enact Enterprise System is based on an Internet-centric architecture that integrates with Medical Manager's existing systems. This not only delivers the anytime/anywhere access Medical Manager's teams needed, but also simplifies project-management administration from the IT department's standpoint.

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The Results: Simplified Resource Management and Real-time Status for Every Team Member
By providing all team members with simple, browser-based access to a central information repository for all projects, the Enact Enterprise System has made real-time collaboration a reality. "With the implementation of Enact, we are now able to streamline our communication and track audit trails more efficiently-it's a significant advantage to be able to always provide updated information to managers in all of our offices", added Liddell. "A team member in Ohio can work with a manager located in Kansas, seamlessly, and know whether or not they are on schedule."

Because the Enact Enterprise System was designed to handle the complexities of multiple projects, it has helped prevent resource conflicts from project to project. Tim Liddell found ActionTask, one of Enact's core client components, invaluable because of its useful presentation of an individual's tasks and current status. Based on an employee's role, he or she can see all appropriate project information, including task responsibility, priority, deadlines, and status, while only managers have the ability to make assignments.

"Before implementing Enact, we had no way to manage so many individual work loads. Now we can see who's responsible for what, whether or not they're able to meet critical deadlines, and what kind of progress is being made", says Liddell. "It allows management to better visualize and understand the production and distribution of projects for every person in every group-which overall makes the company more efficient and productive."

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The Bottomline: Counting on Continued Success for Every Project with the Enact Enterprise System
Medical Manager Midwest now relies on the Enact Enterprise System for managing every one of its 400+ projects with ease and security. With their newfound ability to communicate and collaborate in real-time, Tim Liddell's teams more easily complete their most complex and challenging projects, while the company's executives get the information they need to make decisions and keep the business profitable.

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