OpenSource, Inc.

Business Need - Dean has many thousands of contracts, mostly with various clinics, hospitals, individual doctors, pharmacies, and other health facilities (eye, dental, etc). These contracts are periodically re-negotiated, so the document organization (where do I find my most recent contract with clinic X?) and the contract term sheet (what are the terms provided by clinic X for eye care?) are the major challenges.

Success with openSource - Dean VP of IT at the time has found openSource via Navitus, a subsidiary of Dean that has been using openSource successfully, and gave you a good reference. Our initial objectives were (a) efficiencies across the organization, and (b) compliance (secure, reliable back up). We checked several systems that were not so flexible. openSource was by far the most flexible in its ability to address all of our complicated caveats. The roll out was significantly accelerated once we invited Uri Zernik to Madison for a 2 day orientation. He got to understand our business and the objectives of the various officers involved. He provided  solutions geared to our needs, mostly in the design of our term sheets. Dean term sheets can be very complicated and include hundreds of fields. They need to be organized smartly so that the data is registered correctly and so that later one can search and find contracts based on the fields.

Great Features & Easy Customization - openSource is utilized heavily for search, reporting, and mass emailing. Various departments had problems searching for documents and producing timely reports. They have different term sheets so we had to show them how to customize their term sheets. openSource now presents Dean with a one stop shop. Since our term sheets are so complex, we needed some openSource customization. Since you guys made your adjustments and fine tuning the term sheet search is working great for us. We can't thank you enough!

Flexible - There are various situations where openSource is very helpful. An officer in another department was looking for a provider contract under a name that was not 100% correct. So he could not find it based on the filing system. We used openSource full-text search and we found the contracts and the provider. In another situation, we were looking for a certain term that should have been coded in the term sheet, but was not there. Again, we used full-text search and found the contract. In yet another situation, the compliance officer was looking for contracts where "audit" was mentioned. We helped her by trying some smart queries. For her this was definitely better than running around the company to collect her papers. openSource has really served our entire organization very well!