“The original route optimization system we had was error-prone and we struggled to scan barcodes accurately. With eLogii scanning is a breeze and the efficiencies we get are amazing. Running reports used to take a day a month (putting together the data etc.) with eLogii it is a click of a button” – Alan Hulme - Facilities Manager – Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust
Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) brings together staff and services from Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. NCA are one of the largest NHS providers in the country with a dedicated team of over 20,000 staff delivering excellent healthcare to over one million people across Salford, Oldham, Rochdale and Bury as well as providing more specialist services to patients from Greater Manchester and beyond. The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England and is the second largest single-payer healthcare system in the world with an annual budget approaching £200 billion and employing in excess of 1,200,000 full time employees.
Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust had a route optimization solution in place that allowed them to scan barcodes when picking up blood samples from doctors surgeries around the region. The challenge was the scanning functionality was hit and miss and often pickups (which are of a highly time sensitive nature) would take longer than desired.
Additionally the routing functionality was not strong enough to support the operations and Google Maps was being used in order to create routes (or in many cases update recurring routes).
Internal customers were not able to track the statuses of pickups and deliveries, nor were they able to get access to detailed reports summarizing performance over a particular time period.
Training times for new drivers were significant because of the complexity of the solution in place.
Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust were looking for a robust, user-friendly route optimization solution that allowed for their barcode scanning workflow at pickup to be seamless, support detailed audit trails and reporting while at the same time streamlining communication and reducing manual work.
The team had evaluated a number of leading solutions in the market before coming across eLogii and were not convinced that the benefits they would get from the solutions would outweigh the switching costs.
Due to the mission critical nature of the service they offer and the importance to local patients, selecting the right route optimization software solution was a key strategic decision for Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust.
With eLogii, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation achieved a solution which surpassed their initial requirements and gave them the confidence to move away from their incumbent solution that they had used for many years.
“eLogii is a very complete and easy-to-use solution that has cut the vast majority of our manual work. Many of the tasks that we were doing previously would take hours, or in the case of reporting even days, but with eLogii it is all automated and hassle free – literally seconds and a couple of clicks in their amazing dashboard!” – Stephen Pitt – Transport Supervisor
Below we have explored some of the areas of the solution which were key to Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation achieving such strong results with eLogii.
Due to the time critical nature of the service Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust are carrying out for their internal customer, knowing that time windows will be met is critical. With eLogii all factors relevant to planning are taken into account with ease and the team can have very high confidence that time windows will be met allowing them to comfortably meet and exceed SLAs.
Furthermore – the solution provides visibility into why potentially some time windows might be more difficult to make versus others and includes the ability to take into account a variety of different service durations at different locations – for example not all pickups at surgeries take the same amount of time.
eLogii’s driver app, downloadable from the iOS and Android play stores is running on the driver’s tablets which are in the cabs of the vehicles.
The app empowers drivers with an easy to use tool, from specific instructions, turn by turn
navigation, exceptions handling all the way though to sign on glass and photos.
Driver training on the app is simple and takes minutes versus hours (or even days) with some other solutions as a result of an intuitive and user friendly user experience.
Additionally, barcode scanning at pickup was very key for Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation’s use case and with eLogii scanning was made seamless and very easy saving hours of combined time during the course of a week and additionally minimizing human error significantly.
Finally driver instructions and specifics that are required at particular locations are displayed clearly to the driver at the right time in the lifecycle of a pickup – this was instrumental in reducing human error and keeping driver training to a minimum.
With eLogii, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust were able to quickly plan and make adjustments to routes (many of which are recurring once initial plan is set) on a daily basis.
eLogii supports recurring and templated routes as well as completely dynamic planning.
Via the dashboard, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust also gained unparalleled visibility into routes and how they were performing on a daily basis.
If regular drivers were away (either ill or on holiday) with eLogii Northern Care Alliance NHS
Foundation Trust are able to set exceptions which would exclude particular drivers from planning for a defined period of time and allow relief drivers to automatically be considered in the planning also.
“We wouldn’t be without eLogii now for route planning and pickup / delivery management. We’d highly recommend the solution to other parts of the NHS or any similar use cases out there. The team are also flexible and listen and the software is the most robust and configurable out there!” – Alan Hulme - Facilities Manager – Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust