Getting Started with Case Management

Are you ready to embrace case management?

Case-style work goes beyond the courthouse or social services agency. It’s any work that requires human decisions and discretion – typically driven by information. This includes everything from the IT help desk to contract management to customer service and more. Effectively managing this information-centric work will keep your customers happy, your employees productive and your organisation healthy and profitable for years to come.

Are you ready to embrace case management? Read below for three steps to get started.

Identify opportunities to improve

What areas in your organisation can benefit from case management?

• Look for areas that are dependent upon your knowledge workers – things that can’t be predicted or fully automated.
• Look for work currently managed in scattered spreadsheets, network folders or departmental databases like Access or Lotus Notes. How are you handling related information and supporting content required to make decisions? Is information frequently lost or out-of-date?
• Think about your processes, people and departments that are customer-, constituent- or student-facing. How can you improve these relationships and better manage the critical information that supports them?
• Consider “gaps” that exist in your daily work – areas that your major line-of-business systems can’t fully support. For example, can you easily access related documents, notes and more from your SIS, ERP or EMR? Are users spending time switching between systems to get work done?

Once you’ve found these, you’ve identified opportunities for a better case management approach. Determine where you’re experiencing the most pain – whether that’s cost, time or quality of customer service – and start there.

Choose a solution that allows you to be agile

When it comes to case-driven solutions, you have several options. You could have developers build applications via custom coding or purchase multiple point solutions, each specific to one process. However, custom-coded applications take longer to build and are difficult to change; point solutions, while effective for one use, can’t be easily extended to other areas or tailored for specific needs.

A content-enabled, low-code application devel­opment platform equips you to be agile, benefiting your business and your customers. Rather than spending time developing from scratch or going to RFP for each solution, you can point-and-click configure case-driven applications that connect all your information and supporting documents. Faster, more tailored applications equate to faster, more tailored solutions to your customers’ needs. Point-and-click configuration also allows you to more easily adapt existing applications and add additional applications over time as requirements change.

Consider the future

Think about your long-term goals – such as more personalised customer service, faster incident resolution, more comprehensive investigations. As your organi­sation grows toward these objectives, will the tools you choose today be able to grow and expand as well?

You’ll also want a solution that can scale and shift with changing business and customer needs, easily extending to other processes and departments. Your software vendor will become a longtime strategic partner, so be sure to select one that has industry-wide recognition and proven case management implementations.

Finally, think about your employees. They want a better way to get work done and tools that help them rapidly resolve issues, track customer information and manage relationships. An ideal solution empowers them with a complete view of all data, documents, notes and other information surrounding a case, allowing them to better serve and ultimately retain your customers.

Click here to learn more about how OnBase effectively supports case management.