PROVAIL’s Employment Services program provides community-based vocational assessments, individualized job placement, job coaching, and supported employment for adults with disabilities. They partner with the business community to recruit, hire, and train employees with disabilities.
These services are all managed out of a Salesforce system. PROVAIL’s Salesforce journey actually started over 10 years ago. Their legacy system needed an upgrade to match their program advancements.
Challenges
PROVAIL’s legacy Salesforce system lacked sophistication in key features like job tracking and billing, and it was built in the older Classic interface. PROVAIL’s innovative program needed a modern and complete Salesforce system to match. They also wanted the option to broaden their impact by sharing their unique model with other supported employment agencies.
PROVAIL came to us to help them create a system that provided:
- A modern UI for improved ease of use.
- A mobile friendly interface to support their work in the field with clients and employers.
- The right architecture to accurately track and report on their work.
- The ability to be rolled out to other supported employment organizations.
Solution
We worked with PROVAIL to analyze their needs and priorities. During this process, we all agreed that the best approach was to rebuild their legacy Salesforce system from the ground up in Lightning Experience using Lightning Components.
PROVAIL Employment Services’ team of employment counselors and billing managers now use Salesforce to track and manage their work. This includes participant information, business contacts, job development efforts, job support, job wages and hours, case notes for services provided, service plans, and billing. The system provides key views needed by the team, including tracking participant progress toward goals.
Given the success of their overall supported employment model, PROVAIL is committed to providing their model to other organizations. The system is built as a managed package, which enables PROVAIL to sell this system to similar organizations. By scaling the system, PROVAIL plans to improve outcomes for supported employment agencies regionally and, eventually, throughout the country. Still in the early stages, the system has been rolled out to one other organization, with more on the way in the coming months. We’ll talk more about this in a future post.
Results
When the Salesforce system is used in tandem with PROVAIL’s employment program standards – standards that the system itself facilitates – it produces notable improvement in program outcomes.
Tangible benefits of the new system include:
- Better data. Salesforce enables PROVAIL to have a rich set of data on its participants. Users report that it’s easier to access and update data via desktop and mobile, which improves data quality and helps the team be more efficient with their time. Billing Managers utilize dashboards that report on potential errors. This enables them to quickly reach out to Employment Counselors to resolve errors (learn more about exception reporting).
- Improved progress tracking. Employment Counselors have a progress bar to give them an easy to read visuals of how many service hours have been documented relative to the number that are authorized.
- Time savings. Billing Managers previously spent several days pulling together the information required for the County’s billing process. Now, in a matter of hours, they can quickly export reports to get the data into the County’s billing spreadsheet format. This is a significant reduction in the amount of time staff spend on billing.
- Better data integrity. Billing Summaries can be marked as Finalized and locked from any further modification. This stops Employment Counselors from accidentally modify past case notes and ensures data integrity for audits.
- Mobile and voice data entry. Employment Counselors are often on job sites with participants. Using the Salesforce mobile app provides a quick and easy way to enter case notes on the go.
- More collaboration. Teams are collaborating more, sharing job leads and sourcing opportunities from each other to connect the right resources to each participant.
- Easy access to key metrics. The system has enabled PROVAIL to focus on key program metrics. These include the number of new job starts created, the increase in hours worked, actual wages earned, how quickly participants are place in new jobs, and the increase in hourly wages. Here are a few examples:
With the new system, the PROVAIL team spends less time chasing people down for information and more time focused on program goals. These efficiencies significantly streamlined administrative tasks and, most importantly, freed up employment counselors to spend more time with participants. PROVAIL’s integrated model of service practices plus a Salesforce technology solution consistently produce some of the highest job-placement results in the region all while serving people with the most severe disabilities.
In part 2 and part 3 of this blog series, we dive into how the system works for two key parts of PROVAIL’s supported employment work – managing caseload and billing.