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Objectives

The primary goal of the Spry Adept project is to provide an online solution for Senior Housing Providers staff, covering and simplifying most of the daily tasks of the community Activity Directors. The product has four major components: Newsletter Product, Activity Product, Marketing Product and Admin Product.

Solution

After careful analysis of project's goals, TDS has come up with the solution that would best-fit requirements of the project. One of the crucial issues was that the product be very easy to use since the product users are usually not sophisticated in computer technologies. TDS managed to balance the complexity of product with ease of use. The product user interface is consistent and simple, it does not require anything but a web browser and yet it allows its users to produce colorful and non-trivial newsletters, track leads, residents and events, generate reports, print and send letters to senior families and much more.

The product was thoroughly tested; a testing team worked in parallel with the development team to identify bugs immediately and before they had impact. Several deployments were made, each time adding functionality to the production server, increasingly providing more and more easy to learn features to end-users.

Result

As the result of more than a year of work, TDS has produced and upgraded several times an easy-to-use and yet sophisticated system which has been in use since Feb 2005 and is highly appreciated by its users.

Software Features

Newsletter Product
Newsletter Product allows users not sophisticated in publishing or even in computers to create and print complex newsletters for their communities. Activity Directors create and manage articles and photos in the library of their own, they may share articles with each other. The Activity Directors are also provided with articles and newsletter templates by the company admins and the development team. By pulling a template from the database and just pointing which article goes to what page/section the director may create a newsletter in a few mouse clicks. The Newsletter Builder is able to automatically pull data from the Activity Product or Marketing Product to populate the newsletter with data. In a single mouse-click the director may send a newsletter to a publisher for printing. Everything is aimed at providing the most easy to use system and this approach proved to be extremely popular.

Activity Product
Activity Directors are responsible for providing care and entertainment for their residents. The Activity Product allows directors to keep track of their residents, their needs, preferences, provide informational updates to their families. It allows directors to manage and share activity library, create and publish calendars of activities with all the relevant documents, track resident participation in the activities, run reports and learn their residents better in order to provide them better services and better care. Different tools allow easy navigation among multiple modules, tasks and follow-ups don't let directors to forget about important actions to be taken, easy search allows to quickly find relevant information. The product is designed so that it helps newbie directors to quickly get into day-to-day tasks of Activity Directors by assisting and guiding through various activities, as well as provides sufficient tools to an experienced director.

Marketing Product
Marketing product is very much the same the Activity Product; the difference is that this product is aimed at tracking community leads and their needs, tracking lead sources and associated costs, creating and publishing a calendar of marketing activities.

Admin Product
Admin Product allows company admins to supervise activities performed in the system and take over them when necessary, customize certain company specific data, backup and restore communities, run various reports comparing performance of different divisions.

With the four products combines, the Spry Adept product is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for the staff of Senior Housing Provider companies. The product was released in Nov 2005, while certain parts of it have already been in use by a senior housing company for more than a year.