Bupa is a leading international healthcare group serving 32 million customers across 190 countries. The group operates a broad range of services across Australia and New Zealand including health insurance and health services – dental, optical, medical, GP clinics and aged care facilities.

Employing more than 84,000 staff worldwide, Bupa Australia and New Zealand remain a significant market within the group, servicing 4.7 million Australians and making up a large portion of revenue and market share across the organisation. At time of publication (2017), Bupa Australia and New Zealand included more than 120 Bupa-owned Members First dental clinics, Bupa optical stores and Bupa GP clinics. Bupa also provides personalised care at more than 65 Bupa aged care rest homes.

The organisation's aims are to improve the way it communicates with clients, as well as to shorten the time it takes to have its services go to market. 

To do this, Bupa needed to migrate its Sitecore environment from an on-premises platform, to a unified, standardised Microsoft Azure platform across the Australia business.

The overall business driver for this was to release products into the market in an agile and efficient manner, enable better engagement with existing clients, and attract new customers across Bupa’s services.

Datacom worked side-by-side key Bupa technology teams to define the key success outcomes and business benefit. This included collaboration with the Bupa production support team, who are responsible for keeping the environments up and running, and the Bupa marketing IT and solution design teams, who automate the exisiting Sitecore environment and would manage the move to a Microsoft Azure-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

This worked to improve environment creation times, and the close collaboration opened further innovation opportunities, which saw Datacom extending this solution to a broader, more advanced application life-cycle management offering.

 

“We wanted a partner that had the technology credentials and experience to be able to build an application deployment solution to speed up the time in which we created environments. The innovation that the joint Datacom and Bupa teams delivered on provided a significant productivity improvement in this specific area within Operations.”

Damian Purcell, solutions architect, BUPA Australia

 

The deployed solution was a significant improvement in development times. This enabled Bupa’s technical teams to release faster, contributing to overall agility and speed to market. For example, the new implementation meant that Bupa was able to reduce Sitecore development times from 15 days to approximately 15 minutes, on average. This has contributed to better internal efficiency and overall end-client experience.

Developers now have a dashboard to quickly create a development or test environment for deployment of their code. They can then quickly delete this code again when not required, to ensure costs are kept to a minimum.

Datacom is continuing to work with Bupa in providing an extended Microsoft roadmap with the end goal of assisting Bupa to provision new technology in less time with a direct effect on positive client engagement.

 

Related industries
Healthcare
Related solutions
Software engineering