We were brought in after the launch, which is rarely a happy moment to arrive. A healthcare-administration provider had taken its ERP live, the original implementer had largely moved on, and the system had never settled.
Tickets were arriving faster than they were closing, the same problems kept coming back under different descriptions, and the workarounds people had adopted to get through the first weeks were quietly hardening into permanent habits. The first month-end close on the new system was approaching, and nobody was confident it would land.
The system was not broken so much as un-stabilised — the difference between a go-live and a working operation, which is the difference real hypercare is meant to close.
The challenges we had to solve
- A ticket queue with no triage, where genuine breakages, training gaps and feature requests were all mixed together.
- Workarounds from the first chaotic weeks that were becoming the de facto process, undermining the system they bypassed.
- A first close bearing down, with posting errors and interface failures still unresolved underneath it.
- A team that had lost faith in the system and, understandably, in the idea that it could be fixed.
How we approached it
We started by separating the noise from the signal. Every open ticket was triaged into what it really was — a genuine defect, a missing piece of training, or a request for something new — because treating all three the same is what keeps a queue growing.
The real defects were ranked by their impact on the close and on daily operations, and we worked them in that order rather than by whoever shouted loudest.
In parallel we went after the workarounds, because each one left in place is a small vote of no confidence in the system. Where a workaround existed because the system genuinely could not do the job, we fixed the system; where it existed because nobody had been shown the proper path, we showed them.
Through it all we kept one eye fixed on the approaching close, clearing the posting and interface issues that stood between the team and a clean month-end.
Where it stands
The first close landed, which did more for confidence than any amount of reassurance could have. The ticket queue now drains rather than fills, the workarounds have mostly given way to the real process, and support has settled into something the provider’s own team can carry through normal routines rather than a permanent emergency.