The Challenge

PFM dental was established in 1990 and provides numerous services to the Dental Practice Industry encompassing: 

• Practice Sale and Valuations
• Legal Services
• Chartered Financial Planning
• Chartered Accountancy

With many streams to their business there were complex overlaps between activities and contacts and internal and external stakeholders. Originally, the teams were managing their processes in a paper format but as the business grew it was becoming more and more difficult to keep track of all the contacts, opportunities and inter-related parties. Having researched many CRM offerings for the Sales and Valuations team, the directors of PFM realised that their choices were limited: live with a manual process of paper records and a simple ‘off the shelf’ CRM; expensively customise a commercial product or have a bespoke CRM developed for them.

Director Martyn Bradshaw approached ap16 to understand how we could deliver them a solution to their challenges.

Our Approach

From an initial outline brief of the required data model, our first objective was to understand the level and complexity of services that PFM provide and to understand their business processes. As with all our projects we held a number of workshops with key client stakeholders where the intricacies of the required solution were discussed.

From the workshops a full functional specification was created detailing the user journeys, business processes and the required outputs. A design phase was then undertaken to create and refine a user interface that was intuitive, easy to use, but presented complex relational data. This UI was then developed into a prototype system and final interface agreed.

Once the UI was understood and finalised the complex business specific functionality was added. There were a number of staged deliveries of the system, with PFM dental to providing continual feedback to refine the software at each stage to produce the final solution.

The Outcome

ap16 delivered PFM a robust user friendly CRM system that specifically adhered to the business processes in order to ease the time constraints on the team. The system provides a central repository of all interactions between multiple interested parties and facilitates a much more inclusive service offering from PFM Dental to their clients.

The Future

The system has been in operation for over a year with no calls for ‘Break-Fix’ support. Discussions are currently under way for phase 2 of the CRM in order to add additional functionality and enhance the system for PFM Dental’s continuing growth. 

www.pfmdental.co.uk