Caché Provides Reliability and Adaptability to Richland Newhope Center
Key Benefits
- Reliability
- Rapid Development
- Scalability
When Richland Newhope Center, a human services organization in Ohio, wanted to upgrade their information systems to be Y2K compatible, they went looking for scalable, customizable applications that would fill their IT needs well into the coming century. For their client information, billing, and tracking clinical operations they chose the Caché-based Avatar application from Creative Socio-Medics. Richland Newhope discovered that in addition to the flexibility and extensibility that first attracted them to the Avatar application, it provides another important benefit. In over three years of operation, the Caché-based solution has never gone down.
“People expect their computers to work”, says Scott Anderson, Information Systems Manager at Richland Newhope, “so they don’t marvel when that happens, day-in and day-out, for years. But I am responsible for ensuring access to the system, and I notice when an application is extremely reliable. Except for the times when we had to bring the system down to upgrade the Windows operating system, Avatar has been available since we installed it in the middle of 1999. In my experience, that’s a remarkable level of reliability.”
Remarkable indeed, especially considering the complexity of Richland Newhope’s operations, and the scale at which they’ve grown. The center offers a full gamut of human services to mentally retarded and developmentally disabled individuals in Richland County, Ohio – ranging from a residential facility for the medically fragile, to numerous “in community” programs including running a school for developmentally disabled children, and providing employment opportunities for adults. “We serve more than a thousand individuals at any given time, and we need to track their progress through any number of different programs, services, or facilities,” Anderson explains. “We need to be able to spot trends or patterns within our operations and, of course, we need to be able to bill the appropriate agencies for our services. That’s a big job, which is constantly getting bigger.” According to Anderson, in the three years that the Avatar application has been up and running, Richland Newhope’s client database has mushroomed from about 200 megabytes to over four gigabytes of data.
"Our Caché-based application has been available since we installed it in the middle of 1999. In my experience, that’s a remarkable level of reliability.”
-- Scott Anderson
Information
Systems Manager
Richland Newhope Center
At the same time, Richland Newhope has harnessed the rapid development capabilities of Caché through the use of application extension tools provided by Creative Socio-Medics to expand and customize the Avatar application. Says Anderson: “When we were evaluating client information systems, adaptability was high on our wish list. We liked the fact that Creative provides a package for creating new tables and GUI screens in Avatar. And we are delighted at how easy it is to use. For example, we had a paper form, required by the state of Ohio, that we wanted to replicate in Avatar so that our employees could fill it out on the computer. The whole process of building the required tables and modeling the form took only two hours.”
“One of the main advantages that Creative has over our competitors is the Avatar RADPlus modeling tool, which is based on Caché’s rapid development capabilities,” says Alan Tillinghast, Vice President of Product Strategies for Creative. “Instead of working with Creative’s staff to develop design documents, our customers can use our application tools to rapidly add new data content and business rules to the system. With these changes…under customer control… a prototyping process can be utilized ensuring that the completed software meets user requirements. Through the use of Cache’s object development environment this can be achieved without any modifications to source code allowing Creative to maintain a single source code library for our customers.”
Scott Anderson agrees: “Being able to change with the times is important. Our next challenge will probably be making sure our applications meet the latest security standard. And who knows what will come after that? Fortunately, I’ve got a system that is easy to adapt and highly reliable. I couldn’t be happier with Avatar and Caché. I know it’s something I can rely on.”