Client
Nourish Care is a SaaS company that develops social care software for caregivers. Its product, first launched in 2015, serves care homes. It stores electronic healthcare records that workers can access on mobile devices. The Bournemouth-based company prides itself on its ability to integrate its software with caregivers' other systems, creating a joined-up ecosystem that puts critical patient information at their fingertips as they need it.
Today, Nourish Care has over 200 staff, supporting 350,000 carers spanning institutional care homes and in-home residential care workers. These workers use a fleet of 25,000 mobile devices that capture 17 million points of care-related data every day.
Challenge
Nourish Care's founder Nuno Almeida was inspired to start the company after volunteering in a care home, so he knew the environment well. The choice of mobile device to deliver its service was critical. It had to be tough enough to survive a demanding care home environment. Nourish Care settled on the sturdy Samsung XCover handset, initially sourcing devices manually from a local retail shop.
Soon, Nourish Care was a victim of its own success. As customers saw the benefits of its software, demand spread. This created supply scalability problems. The retail store preferred to sell phones with cellular contracts, which Nourish Care didn't need, instead relying on Wi-Fi. So, it would only sell the team five phones at a time.
Nourish Care was too small for Samsung to serve directly, leaving it with a supply gap. If the company was to grow, it needed to plug that gap quickly and efficiently.
Solution
Probrand connected Nourish Care with suppliers via its Marketplace platform. It created a personalised catalogue featuring just the handful of products that the company needed to buy on a regular basis. This expanded over their relationship as Nourish Care added the Samsung XCover phone and the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active5 rugged tablet to serve carers that needed to enter and view more data.
Probrand also offered its buy-and-hold service to Nourish Care, which does not have the space to store large amounts of device inventory. "Probrand allows us to take shipments in batches to make our process more workable," explained Jon Brown, device product owner in engineering at Nourish Care.
"Probrand gives us a direct point of contact, which saves us heaps of time. That's one of the biggest benefits of this relationship."
Jon Brown, Nourish Care
Results
The Marketplace personalised catalogue has created both cost and time savings for Nourish Care.
Stock availability
The Marketplace platform solved Nourish Care's stock availability problem. The personalised catalogue became a one-stop shop for it to place orders through multiple suppliers to source the phones it needed. Brown is able to see all of the suppliers and prices in one easy-to-use dashboard when he needs to make an order.
Time savings
Thanks to Probrand's buy-and-hold service, Nourish Care can order devices in advance and then unlock batches from Probrand's warehouse for same-or next-day delivery. This enables it to turn around phone configuration and delivery quickly when the time comes to fulfil a customer order.
Price savings
The Marketplace platform also unlocked valuable pricing deals for Nourish Care, which have created substantial cost savings over their multi-year relationship. Maximising those savings is easy, because the personal catalogue allows Probrand to automatically apply all available discounts, including volume purchase discounts. Brown can easily see what he is saving when he places the order.
Price predictability
Probrand's buy-and-hold service enables Nourish Care to buy phones in advance at a pre-arranged price. This enables the company to quote device prices for its customers - many of which buy in large numbers - certain in the knowledge that the price won't change.
"If you were buying phones on the grey market, prices could change weekly," Brown said. During the pandemic, demand increased for devices in the care industry just as supply chain availability fell. "We had stock warehoused with Probrand to ensure that we didn't fall into that pricing trap," he continued.
Robust technical support
While Nourish Care has excellent engineering talent, the need occasionally arises for vendor help, especially if Samsung changes something in the operating system implementation that could affect the Nourish Care software. Working with an authorised provider gives the company access to enterprise support, including seven-year support for hardware. The Nourish Care team can escalate urgent queries via Probrand where necessary.
The relationship between Nourish Care and Proband has flourished since it began, and Brown anticipated that it will continue. "We're working with a trusted partner," he concluded. "We know how they operate."
"Our account manager at Probrand will push things through and go to that extra level for us. We have that sort of working relationship."
Jon Brown, Nourish Care