Improved information distribution with GEDYS Sales and GEDYS Seminar

The Red Cross Kufstein regional office is an independent sub-organisation of the Austrian Red Cross. Its main task is to ensure rescue services for the population of the Kufstein region in the Tirol lowlands on the border with Bavaria. Around 90,0000 inhabitants live in the area, and seasonally the area plays host to a large number of tourists. The rescue services include transportation of sick people, rescue and ambulance services.

Because of the rescue tasks involved, the structure of the regional office is decentralised. To guarantee the quickest possible times for reaching patients in an emergency, there are four local offices in the region.

A comprehensive quality assurance system is used to both maintain and continuously improve quality. The Kufstein regional office was the first regional organisation in Austria to gain ISO 9001 certification. Through effective cooperation with all partners, the Red Cross wants to achieve and ensure the economic and efficient use of all resources. Here, voluntary and paid staff are its most valuable asset.

With Lotus Notes it has been possible to integrate all managers, including voluntary staff, in one system (with Notes Clients at home), which enables the continuous flow of information and the decision-making process across locations by means of workflows. General communication has been improved and decision-making accelerated. When choosing a solution, the organisation focused on a cost-effective solution with high-quality functionality that can be managed easily by its own staff.

These criteria were fulfilled by the GEDYS Sales and Seminar applications. In the first step, these two applications were implemented at Kufstein Red Cross. These applications are available to administrative department and the trainer. In the administrative department, GEDYS Sales is used for all business correspondence and to process a large number of business transactions, ranging from offers for ambulance services through the settlement of all services beyond rescue. GEDYS Seminar is used to organise and manage all training for the regional office.

Today, three Notes servers (Kufstein, Wörgl and Kramsach) and two other external watches are integrated in the existing network, whereby Windows NT networks are established in the locations.

The implementation of the GEDYS applications was relatively problem-free, although master data maintenance was quite time-consuming and could possibly have been avoided with an automatic import. After implementation, a high degree of user acceptance was achieved thanks to the intuitive interface and thus minimal training requirement. The structured layout of the GEDYS applications has already helped to considerably improve the document structure and associated information transparency. The meeting minutes and correspondence are clear and quick to access. Text searches on the meeting minutes are particularly useful. External, voluntary staff have access at all times, which has led to a significant improvement in the distribution of information.

Following excellent acceptance of the solution in step one, further expansion is now planned.