Lifeline Manages Growing Business and Enhances Customer Experience with PeopleSoft 8
Lifeline Systems is the leading provider in North America of Personal Response Services. A 26-year old public company (Nasdaq: LIFE), Lifeline Systems connects individuals to the support of neighbors, friends, and emergency services in the community. The individual served is able to directly contact trained Lifeline staff 24 hours a day from around their home or yard by simply pressing a button. A Lifeline Monitor assesses the individual's needs and quickly sends the appropriate support. Over the years, Lifeline has provided this service to over four million people across North America. Lifeline primarily distributes its services through over 2,500 community-based healthcare providers across North America, including hospitals, area agencies on aging, home healthcare providers, and nursing homes. Lifeline operates a world-class monitoring facility in Framingham, Massachusetts that handles over 21,000 calls per day from subscribers as well as a separate monitoring center in Canada through two business models: a business-to-business (B2B) model named Lifeline Monitoring Service (LMS) and a business-to-consumer (B2C) model called Business Management Services (BMS).
Over the past five years, the annual compounded growth of Lifeline monitored subscribers has been approximately 25%. Their customer focus led to a project to locate, evaluate and propose a billing solution to support Lifeline’s business initiatives. An additional goal was to better understand and manage product pricing and billing to all Lifeline customers across their lines of business. This led Lifeline to new technologies that could help to support the expanding customer base with minimal business interruption and reduction of processing costs per subscriber. Additionally, Lifeline needed an enhanced ability to quickly generate financial statements, and the support of future expansions such as the billing of Lifeline Canada and other company owned stores.
The Challenge
Faced with significant growth and an average length of service of a subscriber on Lifeline Systems averaging two years, Lifeline needed an integrated systems approach to enhancing the customer experience. In 1999, Lifeline completed the rollout of its state-of-the-art CareSystem monitoring platform developed using Vantive Tools for interfacing with Lifeline monitors and customer service resources. The next challenge involved the creation of a new pricing and invoice generation system, integrated with PeopleSoft 8 Receivables and Billing, to complete the business cycle. Customized invoicing, where the invoice included information about a Payer’s current account status was important to the satisfaction of their consumer payers. Ensuring a design that leveraged a single source of data from the CareSystem to and from PeopleSoft 8 reduced effort and increased accuracy of these two systems. Full integration for banking and tax requirements, as well as Medicare customized invoices, was also key project goals. In addition to the new PeopleSoft 100% pure-internet software, Lifeline also implemented a new technical infrastructure. Complimenting PeopleSoft and Vertex’s new Quantum release, were Tru64 Unix servers.
The PeopleSoft – Beacon Solution
Lifeline needed a partner who not only understood the PeopleSoft 8 software and the challenges of implementing and developing on a new technical platform, but also had the sensitivity to the end-customers that use Lifeline as a critical safety net. At the same time, Lifeline realized the new Invoicing, Receivables and Billing solution would help to manage their growing business in response to a healthcare climate that demands cost-effective care and patient satisfaction. Additionally, this solution would provide a technical foundation for the future of their other system requirements.
Lifeline turned to Beacon Application Services Corporation to help them through this significant project. After establishing the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture at Lifeline, Beacon worked hand-in-hand with Lifeline staff to develop a critical front-end invoicing engine, which drives much of the back-end customer interaction. Business interlinks, used for online and batch tax processing with Vertex’s Quantum system, facilitated a technically elegant integrated solution. Beacon began the requirements definition, fit/gap analysis, design and prototype activities in September 2000. The PeopleSoft 8 Receivables and Billing prototype was moved onto the new Tru64 Unix environment in January 2001. The majority of construction activities occurred through March 2001 with full end-user training occurring at the end of March. While the Lifeline accounting staff became proficient with their new PeopleSoft system, the pricing and invoice generation system was being developed and tested throughout the spring and early summer.
In August, the complete system went live, producing over a 1,000 invoices a day to service the 350,000+ Lifeline subscribers. The live processing included bank integration for Lockbox and Credit Card processing and Vertex integration to address nation wide tax requirements. The new infrastructure will allow Lifeline to adopt new systems for the increased demands of their complex business.
Benefits
The PeopleSoft-Beacon solution allows Lifeline to remain focused on the company mission of customer service. They no longer wait days for information to be gathered and processed and can now quickly respond to customer questions and service requests. The challenge of seeing inconsistent data from disparate systems is a worry of the past. The system is structured to meet Lifeline’s invoicing and receivable needs for now and into the foreseeable future. The new pricing module provides Lifeline with the ability to manage their product prices with an unprecedented efficiency.
How Beacon Application Services Added Value
Beacon leveraged their technical and functional knowledge of the web technology and new functionality encompassed in PeopleSoft 8, coupled with their system implementation and business knowledge to partner with the Lifeline resources. This allowed Lifeline to focus on the business requirements for their pricing solution and to quickly become self-sufficient in their capabilities to maintain their PeopleSoft solution into the future.
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