Building a strategy for digital transformation and sustainable growth

When a healthcare provider faced risks due to growth in the business outpacing the capacity of their technology infrastructure, they partnered with Inspire11 to develop a digital transformation strategy assessment that would allow their infrastructure to grow to meet present and future needs.

The opportunity

The healthcare provider grew rapidly over several years to over 600 clinics in 24 states. As a result of growth, existing server hosts were at or near capacity. The business experienced challenges with system reliability and had no existing Disaster Recovery solution. The instability of the IT systems ultimately impeded the continued growth of the organization.

Why Inspire11?

Inspire11 partnered with the client to provide a multifaceted solution that combined operational process improvement with our technical expertise. The lean team focused on combining insights from diverse backgrounds and ensuring that highly technical solutions were understandable by a wide audience.

What we did

Inspire11 completed a full strategy assessment, outlining three phases of digital transformation to enable sustained growth for the organization. The initial phase of the transformation focused on minimizing risks by enabling a complete Disaster Recovery solution. Inspire11 designed and tested a flexible modern cloud architecture in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to be used as a Disaster Recovery site for business-critical applications. The AWS foundation established for Disaster Recovery can be leveraged long term as the primary production site hosting highly available applications, enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery, multi-region deployments, and can be expanded to accommodate additional non-production environments.

Action vs. Analysis--Rapid identification, alignment, and action

The food distributor and Inspire11 agreed on a dynamic approach that emphasized swift action to capitalize on the most critical opportunities. By prioritizing initiatives based on their value, complexity, and external dependencies, the team was able to quickly identify and focus on high-impact areas. This method aimed to reduce the time spent on extensive analysis, favoring a more agile, 80/20 approach to decision-making and execution. 

Create a self-funded roadmap by unlocking real value early

The heart of the project was to iteratively work through a solution that would deliver immediate, tangible value to the food distributor - in this case, finding pricing errors through analytics. Inspire11 worked with the client side by side to validate and correct pricing errors in real-time, enabling the team to update and improve the models quickly. In an early validation session, the teams were able to find and fix a pricing error, which alone generated value surpassing the project's costs. This early success not only funded the subsequent phases of the analytics and AI initiatives but also cultivated substantial goodwill and support within the client's management team, setting a solid foundation for more ambitious projects. 

Build on the momentum with bigger AI bets

With the groundwork laid by the initial achievements, Inspire11 and the client collaboratively developed an expansive roadmap for AI and analytics. This roadmap envisioned more complex ventures, such as recommendation engines, promotion optimization, and automated order creation. To support these initiatives, the team established the necessary technical infrastructure and operational frameworks to ensure the food distributor was not only prepared to implement sophisticated AI solutions but also positioned to realize the full potential of these technologies in driving business growth and innovation. The partnership then led to the creation of multiple AI/ML-driven solutions that addressed multiple areas of the business from sales to operations.