Custom Scheduling System

Overview

ESI Employee Assistance Group, one of the 20 largest employee assistance service providers in the United States, services over 1,800 businesses and approximately 750,000 employees nationwide. They offer counseling services, literature, and testing to help build better work environments across America.  However, within ESI's counseling services scheduling became more and more difficult as counseling staff increased to over 50 counselors traveling between 8 locations.  ESI was unable to find a fitting pre-packaged solution to their problem.  Lance Technologies delivered a rapid development solution that exactly fit their needs within budget and on time.

Problem

As ESI Employee Assistance Group continued to grow substantially each year, the scheduling system they were using became increasingly inadequate.  The scheduling staff was required to look at each individual counselor's schedule, which became a huge time sink with over 50 counselors.  In addition, as ESI expanded to 8 locations the scheduling staff needed to know which location each counselor would be at on a given day.  This led to paper calendars taped to walls and errors as schedules changed.  In addition, the intranet did not refresh instantaneously so the scheduling staff would have to repeatedly exit a counselor's schedule and return to get up to date information and avoid double booking.  The amount of time wasted was enormous!

ESI evaluated numerous pre-packaged scheduling solutions to find a replacement for their current system.  Unfortunately most of those systems were attached to case management systems that were far more complex than required and consequently far more expensive than ESI's budget for the upgrade.

Solution

Lance Technologies developed a solution that both fit the budget and was able to meet the specific needs of ESI.  Special scheduling views were created to see week long views of any counselor, to see the schedules of all counselors at a location, and to see the types of events that a counselor usually did at a certain time.  Lance Technologies also built in special checks to ensure that double booking, incorrect location assignment, or event type assignment conflicts were noticed and handled by the scheduling staff.

By developing a custom solution for ESI, Lance Technologies created a system that directly meets the needs of the client, without adding in any extra complexity.  The streamlined solution has solved all the problems and is operating well.  The development timeline was tight but by adhering to many of the principals set forth by PMI (Project Management Institute), Lance was able to complete development and keep customer involvement throughout the project to deliver an excellent solution.