Supporting the community with a mobilized workforce

March 12, 2020

Rogers Business

How partnering with Rogers helped Brampton Caledon Community Living focus on supporting individuals, families and the community where they needed it most.

Mother and child at a park

A recognized leader in developmental services, Brampton Caledon Community Living (BCCL) provides a variety of services and supports to more than 2,000 children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families across the Peel region. “We provide a full range of services to the community—from supportive housing and community participation (day) supports to service coordination and early childhood education—it’s a 24/7 environment,” says Kevin Hoddinott, Information Technology Manager for BCCL.

To provide these services across a huge geographical area, BCCL staff are out in the community with people. “Our supportive housing teams are visiting and supporting people in numerous homes and our Early Childhood Education staff are deployed in a number of public and private pre-school centres throughout Brampton and Bolton,” Kevin explains.

Challenge

The challenge for Kevin and his IT team was to bridge the connectivity gap between employees who were constantly on the go and BCCL’s seven office locations. They also wanted to minimize the time their lean IT team spent on system maintenance, all within a tight, publicly-funded budget. “Our support staff are experts in their field, not IT professionals. We needed a solution that would work for them and it had to be simple,” explains Kevin.

“We wanted to move to a 100% cloud environment … an important part of that was our phone system.”

With an operation highly dispersed across a wide area, making the right decisions about technology was critical. “We wanted to spend less time fixing and maintaining hardware, so we could focus on making work easier for all the support staff on the ground,” explains Kevin. BCCL determined that moving to the cloud was the right choice. “We wanted a 100% cloud environment,” recounts Kevin, “to get to the point where IT didn’t have to worry about anything on site. An important part of that was our phone system.”

Solution

A truly mobile business phone system was the answer for BCCL’s on-the-go team. “We had been using more laptops and mobile phones for work outside the office and Rogers Unison was essential to this transition.” Rogers Unison_TM, a cloud-based mobile phone system, has enabled BCCL’s widespread team to answer customer calls from anywhere, on the device they choose be it their smartphone, laptop, tablet or desk phone in any of their seven offices.

“We were getting rid of that server in the basement, literally.”

BCCL also made the bold decision to move its entire system to the cloud. “We were getting rid of that server in the basement, literally,” Kevin jokes. “The decision that was not just to get rid of legacy technology but also to mobilize our people,” says Kevin. “Because our staff are out in the community, they don’t always work at a desk, the Rogers team helped us set up MDM (Mobile Device Management) and configure all of our computers to Azure Active Directory.”

“Part of the solution for us was moving away from legacy technology. The Rogers team took time to understand our operations,” Kevin explains. With this understanding, the Rogers team was able to help BCCL move away from high-maintenance, on-premises CRM to a cloud-based CRM solution with far less drain on their IT team.

Results

“Rogers Unison helped us mobilize our people because most of them work outside the office, in the community,” Kevin explains. “Now instead of running back and forth between the office, they have all the functionality of their desk computer and phone out in the field. This means staff working in people’s homes are able to spend more time where they are needed with access to the tools and resources they need to provide a great level of support and care.”

“I’m pleased to note that there is not a single active server across our seven locations.”

“Onboarding and getting staff set up, especially for our mobile teams, has been great for us and it was not just about Unison,” explains Kevin. “I’m pleased to note that there is not a single active server across our seven locations.”

In addition to improved business continuity, Kevin’s IT team has experienced a productivity boost. “We simply have less maintenance work and fewer headaches from across our IT team,” says Kevin. “Now instead of having a team dedicated to fixing issues, we have a developer building out our CRM. Our focus has shifted to making our systems better and more efficient for us.”

Secure, company-wide access to their systems from their mobile devices has created a cultural change for the better. “Now we can do everything we used to do on desk computers right from our phones and the requests for multiple apps have stopped because Rogers Unison is so encompassing.”