NAVBB: Business Process Automation Software

Full-cycle development and automation for animal blood bank

About the company

The North American Veterinary Blood Bank (NAVBB) helps veterinary clinics and hospitals by providing blood products that can save the lives of pets in need.

NAVBB collects blood from healthy animal donors, processes it into multiple products such as plasma and red blood cells, and distributes it to clinics and vets whose patients require help.

It is one of the largest animal blood banks in America, so the organization felt a need to set industry standards, track information, and meet ever-growing demand.

Business challenges

Having been in the market for some time and facing an increasing need for donated animal blood, NAVBB found their existing software and paper tracking system insufficient. Among the problems they faced were:

Lots of manual work
All data was gathered, analyzed, and entered manually

Complicated processes
Each donor application had to be thoroughly reviewed by hand to ensure requirements were fulfilled

High chance of errors
There was a risk of costly errors due to manual processes, data loss, slips, or misinterpretations, which required extra work to control and correct

Looking for a reliable partner

NAVBB wanted to clearly identify all these problems and find relevant software solutions. That’s when they came to SysGears for our business analysis services.

Initially, NAVBB planned to develop software with their own resources, but after the business analysis stage, they decided to outsource the whole process to SysGears.

What we offered

Business Analysis

NAVBB is a pioneer in their industry. Our business analyst interviewed stakeholders to identify the key business challenges and, together with our technical team, performed deep research drawing parallels with the human healthcare industry to design the solution. Our business analyst defined the most critical features for the first release, created a feature breakdown list, and prepared technical documentation to enable further development.

Design

NAVBB needed software mainly for internal needs, which is why the focus of the project was shifted from visual design to creating a seamless user experience. To ensure the software was easy to navigate and improved day-to-day productivity, our business analyst created detailed wireframes of all the most frequent user flows and prototypes of all pages of the web app. After each change, they approved the design solution with the client.

Development

Our software engineers started by designing an extendable architecture to ensure the software’s long-term maintainability and created components used throughout the system to ensure its consistency. Our developers worked on the feature set following the Agile methodology, delivering features in small iterations. They paid special attention to product security to keep sensitive information private and laid the ground for the multi-language support required to expand the service in the future. Our full-stack engineers were also responsible for system deployment when the software was ready for release.

Quality Assurance

A QA engineer worked on reducing the probability of mistakes and defects, identifying possible bugs, testing on requested platforms, and ensuring that requirements were fulfilled. Our specialists focused on the software’s usability and suggested improvements to enhance user flows based on hands-on experience with the system. They provided comprehensive test documentation to ensure complete test coverage and automated frequently executed test cases to save time.

Project management

Our PM was responsible for planning work on the project, managing the team, establishing clear and transparent development processes for the client, and mitigating risks, all to make sure that development was efficient and on schedule. The project manager monitored the team’s performance and conducted demos for NAVBB after each iteration to get feedback, adjust the scope, and align development with any changes in business requirements.

Technologies

We always select cutting-edge yet proven technologies to ensure our projects’ maintainability, security, and scalability

Frontend

TypeScript

React

Ant Design

Apollo Client (GraphQL)

SASS

Backend

TypeScript

NestJS

Apollo Server (GraphQL)

TypeORM

PostgreSQL

Deployment

Elastic Beanstalk

EC2

RDS

CodePipeline

CodeBuild

ECR

S3

Design

Figma

Draw.io

Project Management

Trello

Slack

Miro

Google Workspace

Whimsical

Team

We formed a team of a business analyst, two full-stack engineers, and a QA engineer to meet the product’s requirements and develop the software solution with the expected velocity and within the planned monthly budget.

As an integral part of our services, we also provided a Partner Success Manager, who was responsible for meeting the client’s expectations on a strategic level even outside of the project scope. Our client had regular meetings with our Partner Success Manager to ensure that SysGears’s services were always aligned with NAVBB’s business needs.

Solutions

Single source of truth

We digitized the manual document flow so each employee can get all necessary and up-to-date information from one place at each stage of the work process. For example, NAVBB staff can now access blood test results right in the system. There’s no need for a cross-department interaction to find out if results are ready, and staff can share test results with pet owners in a few clicks.

Smart schedule management

We implemented a comprehensive schedule management solution that helps to coordinate all of the company’s customers and team members. For instance, it enables customers to see when the collection team is available and easily set appointments. At the same time, NAVBB staff are now able to better plan their time, get notifications about scheduled appointments, and review information about blood donors in a single place.

Enhanced customer experience

We created personal accounts for customers so they can schedule consultations, add new pets, get notifications from NAVBB about upcoming sessions, and access their pets’ health information 24/7. Reminders are automatically sent to pet owners when the recovery time is over and their pet is ready to donate again to encourage customers to return to NAVBB and continue saving pets’ lives.

Automated business processes

We automated the internal business processes of NAVBB, making the everyday routine more efficient. For example, right after a customer fills out an application form, it’s automatically checked to ensure the pet can become a donor and doesn’t have any medical contraindications. When the application is approved, the owner and donor profiles are created automatically so personnel can easily manage their customer base.

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