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Case Study in the series on Case tracking Online
Sykes Anderson is a 3-partner civil and commercial firm close to the City in London E1. We have departments dealing with commercial litigation, property, commercial work and tax and probate.
We use Osprey software supplied by Pracctice Limited. We have been with this supplier for some time and were successfully upgraded by them to the current product about 2 years ago. We have been using the normal Osprey case management software, which we have customised for use in each department.
The technical aspects of implementing the case tracking software were relatively painless. However, the internal logistical issues and human resources issues involved in implementation and in partner and staff acceptance were much more difficult. Standardising precedents across the firm and standardising procedures both across the firm and within each particular department was difficult. The implementation has now been carried out successfully in all four of our departments. Different techniques are needed in different departments.
The system is used by individual clients, introducers such as estate agents accountants and brokers.
The case reporting software is run on our web server with the reports uploaded to a website continuously from our case management system. We believe that continuous uploading from the case management system rather than an independent manual uploading is essential to the success of the project.
We do not as a matter of policy comment on issues of security. However, it would be fair to say that a reasonable level of IT expertise is required in order to successfully set up the system and to run it. This needs to be coupled with good internal management structures linked to changing the internal culture of the organisation so that partners and staff buy into the new open culture which will be generated by publishing progress reports on the web.
For commercial reasons we are unable to give information about the costs of purchasing and implementing the system. We do however consider that Pracctice has priced the Web Publisher competitively and that it is good value for money. Support costs are also reasonable.
There are considerable e-commerce opportunities available through use of this technology, which we believe will be exploited more fully in the near future.
David Anderson, email danderson@sykesanderson.com.
Firm: Sykes Anderson.
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