Seraro LLC

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am CEO of an IT development firm

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Seraro LLC, and what were your goals?

A leading hospital chain in East Asia wanted to build world class hospital management system to become best in their country. We did the complete consulting and designing of the project but when it came to development, we did not had the bandwidth internally at that point.

At this point, Seraro helped us by taking on the development initiative end to end. This was an ambitious product development with a leading hospital chain in East Asia wanting to build a world-class hospital management system to become the best in their country. Goals included from scratch development to implementation of the system for a 500 bed hospital.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We knew Seraro cofounders as friends and heard a lot about their capability in healthcare and successful deliveries. We also evaluated other organizations on parameters including delivery capability, healthcare domain expertise, management attitude and approach, past clients and work as well as ability to gauge what is required by sharing the design and asking everyone to come with their approach.

Seraro bypassed the solution and understanding of project by miles compared to other potential vendors.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had a KT schedule ruuning for a month, where we completely familiarised Seraro's team with what needed to be built, the scalability and other key factors as well as design and prototype of entire solution.

Technologies included a combination of .NET, Java, Microservices, Caching and search servers. The entire project was divided into 12 milestones with Seraro running parallel sprints on some of these milestones. 18 modules were delivered in a 12 month long process which is an outstanding achievement for an EHR to be developed from scratch.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We did monthly reviews with Senior management. Apart from that one healthcare expert and one project manager were key people. The team also included 4 to 8 developers depending on the production schedule and parallel sprints.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The following challenges were overcome completely:

- Meeting European Standards

- Scaling up and Responsiveness

- Making it a Practitioner friendly by utilizing healthcare expertise

Multi Location and Multi-Lingual Major results are:

- Improvement in patient/member centricity

- Enhanced customer experience

- Reduction of costs and wastage

- High Improvement in operational efficiency

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Project Management style was very hands on with a process-centric approach. Us being a development company ourselves were pleasantly surprised to see process levels similar to us as well as the maturity of tools being used. Tools included atlassian for project tracking and work management and communication was majorly done using a combination of emails and Confluence.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The healthcare knowledge is a sweet spot of Seraro. This made the chances of the project being a success so much better as just a pure development company would not have been able to deliver the project as per our assessment. Plus their team was transparent, proactive, and committed to project success.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There were some bugs in initial releases due to process failure. Post our feedback, the source of errors was fixed by implementing a CI (continuous Integration) system.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CMO of an IT and digital experience company providing a variety of portals and e-commerce opportunities for our customers. We bring in data from the customers, aggregate it, and publish it to their vendors for input, getting inventory back and forth.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Seraro LLC?

We’d started growing, and our tech wasn’t keeping up. Information was coming back and forth in a non-automated fashion. We wanted to put in a strong data capability underneath our portals and enable B2B transactions so that our customers could automatically buy and so the vendors could sell on a B2B platform. We deal with hundreds of vendors, so that got complex.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We asked Seraro LLC to evaluate our problem and come up with the right solution. We set goals, the first of which was having an end-to-end process in which we would not have to touch the data except for reporting or making corrections based on that reporting. The second goal was to enable a system that would allow us to add customers easily. The third goal was to enable transactions so that we had a unified platform and payment processing system as we spun up customers. The fourth goal was to make it so that we could display information differently for every customer. While we have a unified database, not everyone gets all the data, and not everyone uses everything. We wanted to ensure that we weren’t creating a jumble of confusing information; otherwise, people wouldn’t use it. It didn’t have to be a major design effort, but it needed to be branded and have a decent UI.

We’ve been adding customers, and every customer in B2B has different requirements. We’ve also expanded the ways our customers can purchase. We’ve built a better shopping cart over time, which extends the satisfaction of our clients and helps makes us stick. 

What is the team composition?

They must have five different people involved. We have an account manager and two project managers, one responsible for the UI and one for tech. On the UI side, we have a designer and a technician to implement the frontend.

How did you come to work with Seraro LLC?

Seraro LLC appeared in our peer-to-peer discussions, as well as online. They came up as a real possibility because of the president’s LinkedIn profile. He’d worked with a company we did business with quite a while ago. When we saw that, we remembered that his work was excellent. They stood out in a few ways. First, they didn’t try to mislead us about the timeline. They came in with a plan and talked about how much time each piece would take and what the risks were with each one. Secondly, their price was more than reasonable, about 20% lower than the highest quote we received, given that they were using offshore resources. Thirdly, we had confidence in their leadership. I knew Seraro LLC could deliver on my UI expectations.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve probably spent $250,000 so far. It’s an ongoing cost, and I’m currently paying around $5,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Seraro LLC in January 2016 and the collaboration is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve had higher engagement with our clients and more people have used it. We’ve added more users per account, which has led to smaller purchases but more of them, which is okay because the smaller ones are stickier in my mind. With more users, we’re doing more transactions. Given that we’re transaction-based, this is good for our revenue. 

After deployment, we didn’t lose any customers, and we had high satisfaction metrics from our customer base. I surveyed them afterward, and the results were extremely positive.

How did Seraro LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management is one of the things I like most about them. We have weekly meetings, one for UI and one for tech. They’re always on time, and they always send a report the day before. 

They’re on top of the project, and they identify problems. There are always problems, but identifying them and taking corrective action is the right thing to do. As an example, they advised us to get off of our platform. Our company didn’t want to, but we switched to AWS.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What makes them unique is that they have great project management processes and the discipline to execute them. They’re high-trust, and they deliver better than the competition, which is what matters.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They didn’t make technical arguments for why we should switch to AWS; it was only explained as a way to avoid trouble. We lost almost a month because of the change. They did tell us, but they should be more upfront about the risks. Once we adjusted for the flip, they adjusted their project management. We wanted to have this done inside of five months, and we came in at five and a half months. They made up two weeks and delivered.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Set outcome-based goals instead of technical ones. I think they understood the project better because of this. I explained the big business picture and the results that would make my customers happy, and they built their goals from that. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of a specialty healthcare company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Seraro LLC?

We needed to develop our IT framework, brand identity, and marketing efforts. We wanted to build our website with e-commerce capabilities along with a patient portal that would allow us to communicate with patients and schedule appointments. The website needed to be integrated with our CRM system for promotion services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, Seraro LLC interviewed stakeholders about our core values, looking at the vision that we have for the business and defining what we want to project to customers. Based on the interviews, their design team created a brand identity that required a logo and brochures as well as scripts for promotional videos and building a social media presence.

Meanwhile, their business analysts and engineers collaborated with our admin team to define our client intake process, outlining the steps involved as they go through care with us. The team helped us develop process expertise and domain knowledge. Considering each patient journey is unique, they helped us rethink client intake to improve it. Working with our office manager and practice lead, their business analysts developed prototypes for building out the process.

To develop the patient portal and internal appointment management system, the team used two different CMSs: one is for the protected area of our website, which is developed on a LAMP stack, and the other is for the protected section built on a Microsoft stack.

The patient portal is live, but the e-commerce side of things is still under production. Seraro LLC is finishing the UX/UI designs for the platform in collaboration with our customer service team to ensure we provide clients with a seamless experience.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with two business analysts, a digital engineer, a project manager, and two senior associates responsible for designing the application’s architecture and framework. I don’t know how many teammates have worked on the project in total.

How did you come to work with Seraro LLC?

We were looking for a boutique firm that not only had the engineering capabilities, but also a lot of bandwidth. So, we interviewed a couple of companies. After we examined their RFP, it was clear that Seraro LLC understood our project. Their services were good, communication was smooth, and they were responsive to our inquiries. In the end, we decided on them for their healthcare knowledge.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $255,000–$275,000 on the project. We started with a fixed cost, and the team has yet to go over budget. They're slightly more expensive than other vendors we've considered, but their service is worth the price. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We began the collaboration in June 2018, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Since Seraro LLC launched the appointment management and scheduling system, our utilization has increased by 20–22%, which has helped us capture more revenue. Site attraction has increased, too. More patients are choosing us and coming back again because they’re experiencing better service. Whereas before they would receive emails and text messages about their scheduling, they can now use the patient portal to access everything. Having everything in one place has also helped improve our staff’s productivity.

How did Seraro LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

Unlike their competitors, their project management is excellent. My experience with them has been outstanding. Seraro LLC understood the project, trying only to come to us for decisions and reviews. The team was responsive and kept us up-to-date. They told us not only what we should do, but also what wouldn’t add any value to our business. In terms of deadlines, they were sometimes ahead of the curve. Any delays were on our side.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It’s not easy to find a company that understands digital platforms, business communication, and engineering. Seraro LLC brings a highly competent team to the table. They have a unique combination of team members that we haven't readily seen with other companies. They have people who understand design, others who can build the UX/UI components well, and others still who can discuss enterprise architecture.

Are there any areas they could improve? 

They could improve their healthcare domain knowledge. Early on, we spent a lot of time explaining the regulatory environment. The knowledge transfer went well, but they’d really make a selling in this market if they already had it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Start some of the design or ideation work with them because thinking through the project together provides valuable insight.