Red Cross training service gets first aid

The standard image of the Red Cross is of an organisation that helps pick up the pieces wherever in the world the latest humanitarian crisis is unfolding.

And, while there’s no shortage of human suffering to keep it busy, that’s not all it does. Away from the disaster zones, New Zealand Red Cross is a major provider of first aid training.

Anything that contributes to the productivity of such a worthy organisation also does much good for all New Zealanders.

National education and training manager Graham Wrigley says the 70,000 people a year who complete Red Cross courses bring in millions of dollars of revenue for the organisation.

“This is our business side — it’s our biggest source of revenue,” Wrigley says.

About 70 percent of our training courses are for corporate customers, whose staff need first aid certification to comply with Department of Labour Guidelines, and the rest are private individuals.

Wrigley took charge of the organisation’s national training activities about three years ago and discovered the administrative side of the operation was in need of some first aid of its own.

With an application developed in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Nationwide consultancy Magnetism picked up the challenge, replacing a dozen or so existing databases.

Forty hours to migrate data

“This was a large-scale project,” says Magnetism director Mark Smith. “The scope of which can be gauged from the fact that it took about 40 hours to migrate data from just one of the Access databases, in Christchurch, to the new centralised application.

“We’re talking about a massive shift, from 15-yearold and older systems,” Smith says.

Gayan Perera, the Magnetism senior developer who tackled the project, says it was one of the most complex he has worked on, because of the large number of variables involved.

“We had to take numerous variations of courses, locations, customers and contract rates into consideration,” says Perera, who describes Dynamics CRM as hugely customisable.

The application the Red Cross has ended up with, dubbed xRM by the aid organisation — with the ‘x’ coloured the familiar red — automates several formerly manual processes, and makes more than three million records, stored centrally in Wellington, accessible to over 100 users up and down the country.

“It pretty well manages the whole training side of the Red Cross’ operations,” Perera says.

From pencils to Access

It’s a far cry from the way things were done when Wrigley took over.

At that time, the 22 locations where courses were offered had a range of systems of widely varying sophistication — from pencil and paper, to Access databases, to combinations of the two.

These were used for taking and confirming bookings, notifying trainers of course numbers, reserving training venues and resources, invoicing, issuing certificates and informing the New Zealand Qualifications Authority of credits earned by course graduates.

At the sophisticated end of the spectrum, the Christchurch service centre, where Wrigley is based, had developed an Access-based system for taking bookings. However, it lacked proper links with trainers’ Microsoft Outlook calendars.

“It wasn’t a seamless operation. It looked after our people, but it didn’t look after the linkages back into the allocation of training venues and the resources used by instructors. So there was still a pencil and paper aspect to it.

“While we’d developed that in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington had developed systems as well, so everyone was doing their own thing.”

Consistency key

For an activity that was bringing in a seven-figure sum, from scores of national customers, it was being run in an ad hoc manner with outdated systems rather than in a business-like fashion, Wrigley says.

“As the business grew it wasn’t meeting the needs of our clients in the way it should. My view was we needed to organise the business the same from one end of the country to the other so that when we dealt with national clients we were working in the same way.”

A lack of consistency was handicapping the organisation.

National customers, for example, whose staff might be getting instruction at a dozen centres up and down the country, would require invoices to be presented in a particular format. With each centre having its own administration system, Red Cross head office workers in Wellington would have to interpret the different records and manually produce a standard bill.

Wrigley says xRM has transformed the Red Cross’s training operations.

Now, when a course booking is received and details entered in the system, a whole series of processes automatically follow:
• A confirmation email is sent automatically
• The numbers for the relevant course are updated
• An appropriate training room and resources are allocated
• Instructors can see how many people they’ll be teaching
• An invoice is generated and dispatched
• A certificate is produced for successful course attendees
• NZQA is informed automatically
• Revenue is recorded in the AccPac accounting system

Big savings

“There are certainly big savings in the way we manage the first aid business,” Wrigley says.

Just one example is the much-reduced effort required when confirming a booking. In Christchurch, where up to 50 bookings are made a day, printing, addressing and posting confirmation letters used to be a time-consuming and costly exercise.

With xRM’s ability to automatically send email confirmations, and nearly everyone happy to be communicated with in this way, the administrative workload is much lighter.

“We’re saving envelopes, paper, postage and time,” says Wrigley.

This has opened up the opportunity to redeploy administrative staff into roles in other parts of the organisation, such as the Red Cross’ shops, its meals on wheels service and breakfasts in schools programmes.

“The important thing for us, if we want to grow the business, is we have to be able to offer our clients a robust system with no errors in it.

“The results I’m seeing already are meeting my needs better than I thought they would. I’m over the moon because it’s been a long time coming.”

With the use of "Live Meeting" and the ability to work remotely, Magnetism quickly understood and responded to the organisation’s requirements, Wrigley says, and, remarkably, pulled off the job without meeting either him or any other key Red Cross IT staff face-to-face.

“I said the other day we should jump on a plane and go and say hello to these guys.”