Reducing costs through cloud transformation

Formed in 1928, The Pharmacy Guild of Australia (Guild) is a peak national employer organisation, which represents Australia’s community pharmacies. Its core role is to represent the interests of members in industrial matters in the Fair Work Commission and state jurisdictions, as well as providing local member support. Australia’s community pharmacies employ over 70,000 staff, including approximately 20,000 registered pharmacists.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia had deployed the award-winning Fujitsu Grants Manager solution incorporating Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the end-to-end management of the claims process lifecycle. This provides a bespoke, user-friendly online web portal, allowing pharmacies to register and submit their claim applications, following a simple step-by-step online process. However, this on premise platform was becoming costly to manage, it was no longer best practice, and was outdated.

Moreover, its existing contract with Fujitsu was coming to an end, so the Guild decided to migrate the platform to Microsoft Azure, replicating the legacy system while also introducing custom automation. The Guild engaged Fujitsu again based on its excellent relationship and existing knowledge of the customer.

“The fact is that the legacy system was completely out of date and kept crashing. It was handling millions of claims and simply wasn’t designed for that burden,” explains a spokesperson at The Pharmacy Guild of Australia. “And, because we were paying for offsite storage, it was expensive. Moving to the cloud with the help of Fujitsu seemed like an obvious evolution.”

Fujitsu was able to deploy an out-of-the-box cloud-hosted version of Grants Manager within weeks, enabling the Guild to meet a strict deadline. Following considerable data mapping work and data migration, the system was switched overnight with minimal disruption to the business.

Now approximately 2,000 New South Wales community pharmacies can submit around 6,000-8,000 claims each per month via an intuitive and highly available interface. This includes the ability for real-time prescription verification, which previously was logged and checked in Excel.

“We needed the new environment up and running within three months, which gave us little time to prepare but Fujitsu stepped up to the plate with detailed planning, ensuring we met the required deadlines,” adds the spokesperson. “At the same time, we were able to introduce new functionality to make the user experience richer, transforming how we work.”

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia is now enjoying significant savings on its hosting costs by moving to Azure. Moreover, it can easily add new programmes and scale up the platform seamlessly and affordably. At the same time, the Guild can control and manage the new environment in-house in real-time with minimal fuss.

The system is also vastly more reliable, with zero downtime since its launch, compared to regular crashes when hosted off-premise. This makes users and community pharmacies more productive and efficient, enabling them to provide a better service to patients and customers across the region.

“Fujitsu gave us a solution that we can control end-to-end; however, if we ever need the Fujitsu team, they are always there around the clock, as an extension of our own team,” concludes the spokesperson. “We are delighted with our much more intuitive user interface, the real-time verification process, and the robustness of the new platform. It sets us in good stead for the future as a true example of business transformation.”