Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals with Office 365
Summary
Axtrion introduced Microsoft Office 365 at the Pharmacists’ association GESUND IST BUNT (parmapharm Marktförderungs GmbH & Co KG) to achieve better and flexible business processes with increased reliability and failsafe IT system. Office 365 ensures high availability of correspondence, contact and calendar data both on workstations as well as on mobile devices (notebooks, tablet PCs, smart phones). A major step forward for the users is to be able to access updated data sets, made available by fully automatic synchronization, and the use of constantly updated versions of MS Office.
Field of Business
GESUND IST BUNT is one of the largest independent pharmacists’ associations in Germany. Currently, it comprises about 360 pharmacies throughout Germany. The parmapharm Marktförderungs GmbH & Co KG as an operator of the network provides a comprehensive range of services and special offers such as central purchasing terms with producers and wholesalers, private brands, brand development & marketing, training, framework contracts and real and virtual network platforms to increase the profitability of affiliated pharmacies.
Motivation
An essential element for the implementation of the services offered by GESUND IST BUNT is the communication within the network via e-mail. In the past the parmapharm headquarter in Bielefeld used an email system managed by a third party for this purpose. It not only had high operating costs, but was also subject to the following restrictions:
- Lack of flexibility to adapt quickly to special requirements and processes
- Lack of data security with regard to disaster recovery
- Lack of legal certainty in the archiving of e-mails
These disadvantages of proprietary email system forced GESUND IST BUNT to consider more cost-effective and modern IT alternatives.
Project Realisation
With Axtrion’s consulting Microsoft Office 365 has been successfully implemented for GESUND IST BUNT. The data from the old email system were migrated to Exchange Online servers by Axtrion. Furthermore the data were categorized and depersonalized, stored in shared mailboxes and made available to the relevant persons via an effective access control system. The global availability of Office 365 ensures that employees have access to the data during the external sales, consulting and training activities.
As part of Office 365 the latest version of Office 2013 has been installed on all the workstations, resulting in IT harmonization and a stark simplification in future IT maintenance.
Benefits
With the use of Office 365 GESUND IST BUNT could cut its IT costs in half with regard to the operation of the email system as well as software licenses and maintenance of hardware. The shifting of the emails to an highly available and highly secure IT system outside their own premises means that the customer achieved an increased data security for legally compliant email archiving and data loss prevention. Through centralized management of topic-specific e-mails, contacts and appointments, the business processes were harmonized, simplified and optimized.
Axtrion showed with this project how a substantial cost reduction in the healthcare sector could be achieved by the use of modern information technologies.
The Axtrion team provided a very competent and solution-oriented support and almost an uninterrupted migration of the old IT system to Office 365. We continue to profit from their expertise.
