Retirement residences are almost self-sufficient communities that are focused on providing excellent care for senior residents. Masterpiece is no different with staff across nursing, administration, maintenance, kitchen, housekeeping departments and more.

To top it all, providing 24x7 services magnifies day-to-day tasks - scheduling, accounting, regulatory requirements - in scale and complexity.

SOL set out to tackle these optimization issues, which is among the most complex tasks, especially when the size of the organization is huge.

The app was focused on automating a lot of the manual processes that kept track of staff schedules, overtime requirements, and employee communications.

It did so by using custom algorithms, integration with accounting platforms, and implementing web and mobile apps that allowed staff to manage their own schedules.

According to Statistics Canada, private nursing and residential care facilities hit revenues of $15.6 billion in 2020. With operating expenses pegged at $14.2 billion, salaries, wages, commissions and benefits comprised over half of the operating expenses at $7.8 billion.¹

Among public facilities, revenues reached $19 billion and operating expenses at $19.1 billion. The salaries, wages, commissions and benefits were at almost three-quarters of the expenses at $14.1 billion.²

“My overtime and overhead costs are high.”

The relationship between Launchcode and Masterpiece Retirement began with that one statement. Okay, there were a few more steps before that, but you get the drift.

A lot of scheduling and timesheeting processes at Masterpiece were done manually, and then typed in one entry at a time in Excel. As is the case in any organization, last-minute changes to staff schedules are inevitable, and also cumbersome to manage.

Multiply these processes with the various levels of nursing staff and different departments, and it often snowballed into higher costs. And there was manual input of timesheets for payroll processing.

Optimization was the need of the hour for Masterpiece, a balance that is efficient and boosts value.

Most big and efficient organizations do not want to change their processes to suit off-the-shelf solutions available, but want solutions that can work within the framework of the organization's workflows.

To this end, Launchcode's first step was to understand the business and processes at Masterpiece. With 100s of employees across multiple departments and hierarchies, the Launchcode team held interviews with key staff members from every department - nursing to housekeeping.

These interviews were instrumental in creating a custom algorithm that saw various iterations to ensure smooth and accurate workflow.

With sprint methodology guiding the development process, the focus was to work on aspects that were of most value to the solution first.

Multiple two-week sprints went from implementing user authentication and profiles to the scheduling portal and its many user-friendly features.

The employee app, a key element that provided staff with the ability to control their schedules and plan their non-work lives ahead, was next. The app facilitated the use of message boards, shift-related requests and changes, push notifications to inform staff members of key events and updates, among other things.

Response at the initial mock-up stage itself was encouraging, with a request to “turn it on” immediately. The contagious jest and excitement aside, SOL's thoughtful and simple interface that included options to copy past schedules, the ability to add custom shifts, to tackle employee requests, etc. were well received.