NZPA delivers more services to their members with the help of Power Platform.
Meaningful Outcomes
Cutdown data import time from 10 hours to 15 minutes
Members able to manage their membership information, check on their insurance packages, and book holiday homes online
360 degree view of members while providing core business processes and systems including new members applications, reporting member benefits, updating of member information and payment of memberships
Single sign-in portal that integrates core services to have greater visibility of benefits and services on offer
Objective
Replace out-of-date technology with a flexible, adaptable solution that could grow alongside NZPA and benefit their members.
Challenge
The purpose of the New Zealand Police Association (NZPA) is to enhance the well-being of police and their families. They are a union which is the core part of the organisation and a commercial arm which provides services like insurances, discount mortgage rates and holiday homes for their members. They have over 40,000 members made up of 12,000 Police members, with the remainder including family members and retired Police officers.
The old system was fit for purpose when it was created in 2012, although NZPA have since grown while technology has progressed significantly in the last 10 years. This presented an opportunity and a challenge for NZPA in that their members were expecting a certain level of autonomy in managing their subscription, but the system wasn't able to keep pace with the changes and was in fact, holding them back. They needed a system that could grow with them while offering real benefit to their members instantly.
Solution
NZPA has been on a on a lengthy ICT journey. Magnetism started by engaging with NZPA to understand the problems and issues they needed to solve and what they would like to enhance to make the experience better for both their members and internal staff. Dynamics 365 was recommended as the central core system bringing NZPA on the cloud and setting them up for the future.
The new system provided NZPA with one centralised system that gave a 360 degree view of their currently members while also providing core business processes and system that includes new member applications, reporting of member benefits, updating of member information and payment of memberships. Dynamics 365 was perfect fit as the core system, but it was important to recognise and integrate with other specialty systems such as holiday home rental and insurance in order to get the most value out of all systems for police members and their families.
There are two sets of users that the system has to work for, the members and the staff.
For the members: NZPA members are now able to log into a portal (that integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365) so they can go in and manage their membership information, check on their insurance packages, and book holiday homes. When they click on a link inside the portal, it actually takes them into a different system, but they don't have to log in again, because of the single sign on using a system called Auth0. Magnetism went into a collaborative build cycle working with other vendors to integrate with their systems to build a seamless experience for NZPA members.
The NZPA staff work within Dynamics 365 that includes an integration with SharePoint Online for their document management. One of the key challenges for the NZPA staff was with their fortnightly data import process; data imports would either crash entirely or would not run within the timeframe needed. This process was automated with Microsoft Azure in order to help with the invoicing process.
Looking into the future for NZPA means their system will now be able to grow and change with them. They will be able to leverage more of the Power Platform to build:
• Rich reports with Power BI and get some great information about the members
• Chatbots to create better interaction with members with Power Virtual Agent
• Power Apps for the internal staff to work with the information they currently hold
• Power Automate to build things like notifications so members are quickly informed about changes to their membership.
Results
The resulting system has helped both members and internal staff; by providing a single sign-in portal that integrates core services with Dynamics 365, members can have greater visibility of benefits and services available to them. NZPA staff now access a centralised CRM and document management system tailored with options for further development in the future. It is now a system fit for purpose, with option for future development.
“We’ve moved from being held back by our system to something that’s really unleashed our ability to provide that well-being service for our members.”
Using Dynamics 365 functionality and the power of Microsoft Azure allowed Magnetism to simplify the data import process and cut down the total runtime which used to take several hours. Magnetism were able to get this down to 15 minutes – saving on average of 10 hours per run.
The journey has been a symbiotic relationship between the two organisations. Magnetism and NZPA continue to build on the relationship to ensure they continue to get the most out of the system possibilities.
