August 27, 2025 • 19 mins
Learn how a unified Zoho platform and centralized data reduce app sprawl, speed decisions, and improve customer experience. The discussion provides a practical playbook for leaders seeking fewer apps, stronger data integrity, and clear ROI.
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00:00 📈 Nuvia Smiles' Growth and Zoho Integration
03:53 🤝 Collaboration Between IT and Business Teams
07:41 📊 Data as the Core of Business Transformation
11:34 🛠️ Simplifying Processes with Zoho
13:10 📊 Centralizing Data and Ensuring Compliance
18:10 🌟 Benefits and Advice for Simplification
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Nuvia Smiles used Zoho to simplify operations and stay
flexible as its scale to 40 pluslocations.
We are talking with Carl Johnson, Nuvia's chief nerd, for
practical advice that you can use now.
Nuvia Smiles specializes in dental implant surgery.
(00:20):
We have over 40 locations acrossthe country and our specialty is
having a 24 hour turn around from surgery to implant, which
creates a much better experiencefor the patient.
What are you doing with Zoho? One of our primary uses is Zoho
Analytics where we centralized amajority of our data and that's
proven to be one of our biggest wins from Zoho.
(00:41):
We are using some CRM modules and processes.
We have some things we're building in Creator.
We're using Zoho projects for various things across
departments. I can't even count how many Zoho
products we're actually using Parl.
How did Zoho help you simplify your processes?
They provided a nice central place for us with a lot of
(01:05):
different types of functionality.
We found three different categories of business value.
One right out of the gate was business intelligence.
The fact that we could start centralizing our data gave us a
lot more insight into what was happening in our business
processes and gave the executives and management a lot
more power to make better decisions about what to do next.
(01:25):
So Nuvia started, of course, as a small company.
It now has 40 locations and it'sgrowing.
Take us on that journey. That journey actually started
more administratively than it did from a tech or a dev
perspective. The management or the upper
executives want more visual elements that really help them
(01:46):
make decisions, like dashboards and in business intelligence and
things like that. Obviously when you get into
those kinds of conversations, you can't get data unless you
have good applications to give you the data.
And so it turned into a broader conversation of is there
something out there that could sort of be a catch all where we
could start centralizing all of our processes and operations.
(02:07):
So it's it's been a great gap filler, if you will for us as
well as a great business intelligence tool.
And then we're using it in quitea few other ways as well.
You started with over 80 applications.
Every location and every department in the company was
basically just choosing applications as on an as needed
basis to to do the things that they needed to do.
(02:29):
Lots of different spreadsheets, whatever approach they could
find, they would just pick it and use it because there was no
centrality to any of those concepts.
And so that's you can see how you can quickly get to over 80
applications. How did all of this complexity
affect the business operations? There's two priorities
(02:49):
ultimately when it comes to our applications and use of
software. The executive side or UER
management side is really just about the data itself.
It became evident really rapidlythat just controlling the data
was kind of our number one priority.
Let's find out how to control the data.
And of course, one of the biggest wins out of Zoho is just
(03:10):
using the analytics tool becausethat gave us a place to start
centralizing data and realizing what we actually don't know in
the process. And so you have that side of it,
and then the other side of it isactually what's producing the
data. So what applications are getting
used? Are these applications we can
get the data from? Is it friendly to the end user?
(03:30):
And from those two worlds is where that complexity comes
from. And they're really two different
conversations to have at the endof the day, which I think is
where a dev or an IT team can really come into play and have
have some real strength and power in that conversation, as
long as that's what their mission is, is to kind of bring
those two worlds together. That aspect of collaboration
(03:55):
between the IT side and the business side is so important
because of course, business leaders know what they need from
an operations perspective, but they don't necessarily
understand all the insurance andouts of the technology.
And the IT folks don't know what's in the heads of the
business leaders. So how did you bring people
(04:19):
together to make this collaboration work?
We discovered quickly that one of the missing gaps between the
IT team and the executives or the business operators was that
collaboration was that understanding of the two two
different business models, if you will.
Here you have all these locations that are successfully
doing business and bringing smiles to patients lives and
(04:42):
they're seeing the success and the reward and the outcomes.
And then here comes along this IT team and what is it that
we're supposed to bring to the table?
And often times an IT team can be seen as a detriment or
slowing us down a little bit. So having that conversation
between those two sides, if you will, becomes a an interesting
(05:02):
challenge. And I think oftentimes companies
miss out on some of the connecting tissue between those
two things. In the Sprint or agile world
that I come from, we would call that a product owner or someone
that's responsible for having a conversation between the two
sides and taking the business knowledge and interpreting it
into IT or developer knowledge so that it can be developed in
(05:26):
effective and efficient way. And often times a role like a
product owner is not even considered real.
It's something overlooked quite a bit.
And in our company that that wasnot a role that was filled.
And so we sort of had to naturally start filling it.
We chose an approach called the customer journey approach or the
OR the user journey approach, which is more committee driven
(05:47):
than it is an individual or a position where we can bring
people from various departments to talk with different people on
the IT team. So we both come to the same
understanding. So that's how we've kind of
dealt with some of those collaborative complexities that
way by using more committee based knowledge and
collaboration. You use the term journey, and
(06:09):
that kind of collaboration for most organizations definitely is
a process of getting there. Absolutely.
You have to be consistent with quite a few things and there are
journey frameworks out there in the CX world that you can read
up on. A lot of them kind of mirror the
actual agile processes or frameworks where you actually
(06:33):
have meetings that you schedule every so often, every two weeks
or one week or whatever your cycle is on.
And so following a framework I think is very productive and
being consistent with it and making sure that everyone
understands they're on the same team.
So often a dev team and a department can think they're on
different teams or they can feellike they're sort of enemies to
(06:55):
one another. One's bogging down the other
because they don't understand each other.
So I think overcoming that concern is huge in the
collaborative world between different departments,
understanding that we're all on the same team with the same goal
and the same mission, and that'sto bring smiles to people's
faces. Once you can overcome those
kinds of concerns, it's pretty amazing how productive a meeting
(07:17):
or a collaboration can be and how actually enjoyable it can
be. Frankly, at the bigger the
company gets, the more time I think you do have to spend on
relationships and understanding one another and I guess the
emotional intelligence of that process.
And so the bigger the company gets, I think the harder it is
to keep those connecting tissuestight and and close together.
(07:40):
Parl. Earlier you described data as
being the core. Can you elaborate on the role
and importance of data in driving this transformation?
I think we fell back to data at the end of the day because that
is really sort of the doctrine by which companies run.
(08:03):
I think it's really easy for people in a bubble like CEO's or
administrators or like just an IT guy or dev guy to be in a
bubble and see things like, oh, look how sexy that interface is
and think that the sexiness of the interface is what makes a
great product, right? And so you can get a lot of
confusion about what is important.
(08:24):
And of course, a user interface is always really important, but
is not really the most importantthing, right?
You can get by with a less sexy interface as long as the data
it's producing is valuable to you.
So we learned quickly that thosepriorities needed to become very
secondary to the idea that data is our first priority,
regardless of how good looking the interfaces or any of the
(08:47):
window dressing about how we getit, as long as it's easiest, as
easy as possible for the user togive it to us and more
importantly easy and interpretable to give back to
the executives in a digestible way.
So that data is really a lot more important than any other
consideration at the end of the day.
So the data is not just about producing pretty reports, but
(09:12):
actually serving to move a business operations forward.
Correct. And it's so easy to get caught
in the fray of the of understanding that the fray of
if it doesn't look pretty, is itaccurate?
You know, and I guess to some degree trust is a big issue with
that. Trusting the data.
I guess AUI comes in a little bit because it provides a trust
(09:35):
level to data, but you can have the best UI on the planet and
still have really crappy data. So for us, we would we focus a
lot more on data integrity now than anything else and then
we'll try and make it as pretty as we can after the fact.
Earlier you described this largeapplication sprawl.
(09:56):
Tell us about that and how you got your arms around it and
simplified. There's so many conversations
surrounding all those applications, why they chose
them, what data they were using them for, what process and what
data lives behind it. And to get through all those
conversations is sort of step one.
(10:17):
And then, and then the calculus of all that was what is really
the most important because therewere conversations about
interfaces and doesn't run on a mobile phone, etcetera,
etcetera. And the calculus of all that was
the data is what's important. And knowing that it really
simplifies our perspective on how we migrate and how we look
at applications. So our first question is, can we
(10:39):
get the data right? So that changes the conversation
entirely as to well, we need to get rid of this app.
Well, that's pretty aggressive. Like can we get the data from
the app because maybe we can live with that for a little
while before we get rid of the app.
So it really does change the whole conversation and our
priorities and it allows us to be a little a little more agile
(11:00):
with all the applications that are being used.
And if if we can't get the data or the data is not accurate or
providing us with data integrity, then we need to look
at something more aggressive or centralizing it into something
like Zoho. That's interesting.
So the data became your reference point for making
technology decisions about what to keep, where to change, and it
(11:26):
sounds like this was a very measured approach, again based
on the data as the reference. We've kind of ended up there.
I mean, it's still an experiment, if you will, but it
is simplifying our thought process and it seems to make
just common sense. It's intuitively makes more
sense because the conversations were really convoluted and hard
(11:47):
to understand how to prioritize before that.
And so now that we've settled inon this one point of reference
for an application, it just makes all of our conversations
that much better. And we're not shaking other
departments to the core by telling them we're stripping
everything they're using tomorrow, right?
And so there's a lot less fear in it, a lot more trust in the
(12:08):
process. And and a lot of departments
understand that now that we can't get the data, we have to
have a more aggressive conversation about replacing and
they're OK with that because we've walked through the process
from that perspective. And then ultimately, you moved
from this broad application sprawl onto Zoho as a unified
(12:30):
platform. We did have some really good
successes with CRM. We do use Zoho projects and
other tools. We had success with Click and
some other communication tools that are in there.
And again, when we made data thepriority, we learned that we
don't necessarily need to scrap someone's Google Sheet or we
don't necessarily need to scrap a certain application just
(12:53):
because we now have a central tool to use because that central
tool can sometimes make it more complicated, not less, and make
the data harder to understand oraggregate.
And so we've we've learned how to scale Zoho at a proper pace,
I guess is the best way to put it.
Can you describe how you went about centralizing the processes
(13:17):
and the data? With a company like ours, it was
growing so fast there. No one really had their arms
around data. And so we've really had to kind
of chunk that out and take one big piece at a time.
So we have other CRM data, we have other applications data.
And that did turn into US deciding that it was going to be
really important to set up what we call middleware, which is
(13:38):
just some servers in the cloud where we can set up some stacks
that will do certain things, hitAPIs, get data, aggregate data,
push data, have web hooks, push data to us, right?
Just a nice space where we couldcatch anything that Zoho
couldn't get or that other applications couldn't get for
us. And we learned early on that
(13:58):
that was absolutely necessary. And we continue to build on that
stack as well. So that's an ongoing process,
but that's kind of where we ended up.
So we ended up with Zoho, A middleware stack, and then all
of our other apps where we can share data in between them.
And the more we get control overthat data, the better we can
(14:19):
make a decision about where we put the next upgrade or build
out the next application that we're going to use.
So it's been really satisfying process to help everybody come
together and say, you know what data is the most important thing
here. And if everybody agrees on that,
now the application conversationis much different for everyone
involved and not just US againstthem again like we talked about.
(14:42):
As you were undergoing this simplification process, how did
you maintain compliance and dataintegrity?
And of course, you're a healthcare company, so that's
very crucial to you. We did need to make sure that
Zoho was compliant with all of its data requirements and rules,
(15:03):
which they have all those security policies in place for
us. The middle where we've obviously
made made sure that's protected with security and everything
else that has all the chief nerdstuff to go with it, if you will
so you. Started with over 80
applications. How many do you use now?
We don't keep a count, and we don't need to count because
everything we're doing right nowis just a simpler process for
(15:26):
us. So life is just easier.
Yeah. How important is the platform
aspect of Zoho to this simplification process?
The Zoho platform approach has been more beneficial
administratively more so than technically.
So administratively, the fact that Zoho is a has a very low
(15:46):
cost point. They have a really nice program
that gets all users access to all products so that you can
kind of pick and choose or figure that out as you go.
Administratively. It makes that really nice and
cost justifiable to live in thatplatform so that you can be more
agile with it. So I think the platform
perspective, because they made it so flexible administratively
(16:08):
has been very nice. How did Zoho's platform
flexibility enable you to start in one location and then scale?
Zoho really gave us the ability to to kind of carve out a
process, build it in Zoho and then train the staff at a single
location on that process. And then we were able to observe
(16:31):
that and refine it. And once it's working well, we
were able to roll that out to other locations.
So that worked really well for us.
How did Zoho give you the confidence to rely on their
platform to such a large extent?Confidence for us was a building
process. You really don't gain confidence
until you use it. And so we really just needed to
(16:51):
jump in, dip our feet in it, getthe data in business analytics,
try building a few things in CRMand and our confidence grew from
use. And how about the aspect of
being able to share data among the applications sitting on that
platform? That's one of our top three
(17:11):
considerations. Can we build it in Zoho?
Is that because it will be central to all of our users
right out of the gate and, and can we build it better than
what's already being used? And so that becomes an easier
conversation to have because Zoho has an easy building
platform, especially when you'reconsidering things like CRM and
we have used Creator for a couple of different applications
(17:33):
that gets a little more complicated.
But because that's there and available and it's not like
we're paying a bunch of extra money to add a new process to
it. It's just built in now.
It's just a common part of our conversation.
Should we do it in Zoho? Do we need some middleware for
it? Or is the current application
we're using sufficient for now? It gives you that flexibility to
(17:55):
make choices as you go, rather than one huge project.
That's right, especially as a consideration against custom
built applications and things that would be a much bigger and
more expensive to build for sure.
What benefits have you seen by undertaking this simplification
(18:17):
process? The company's successful, we're
bringing more smiles to faces ofpatients and that our end users
are loving the products. Sounds to me like you're
describing 3 benefits. There are hard financial
savings. There is employee happiness, if
(18:37):
we can put it that way, and better customer experience.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
Change is always hard. How did you manage expectations
and gain buy in among employees at the company?
The more transparent you are, the more honest you are, the
(18:57):
more you eat crow. When you make a mistake and can
take the blame, it keeps those conversations more real and
truthful and transparent. And I think the more the better
your collaborations, I think thebetter the entire experience is
for everybody in that process. Now you've been through it, what
advice do you have for other business and technology leaders
(19:18):
who are facing this kind of journey?
Good collaboration, making sure that you have good connecting
tissues. I like to call it between
business departments and an IT or developer department and
consider making data their firstpriority.
Beyond that, I would say have fun and collaborate a lot.
Parl Johnson, chief nerd at Nuvia, smiles.
(19:40):
Parl, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us.
Yeah, it's been fun.
Nuvia Smiles used Zoho to simplify operations and stay
flexible as its scale to 40 pluslocations.
We are talking with Carl Johnson, Nuvia's chief nerd, for
practical advice that you can use now.
Nuvia Smiles specializes in dental implant surgery.
(00:20):
We have over 40 locations acrossthe country and our specialty is
having a 24 hour turn around from surgery to implant, which
creates a much better experiencefor the patient.
What are you doing with Zoho? One of our primary uses is Zoho
Analytics where we centralized amajority of our data and that's
proven to be one of our biggest wins from Zoho.
(00:41):
We are using some CRM modules and processes.
We have some things we're building in Creator.
We're using Zoho projects for various things across
departments. I can't even count how many Zoho
products we're actually using Parl.
How did Zoho help you simplify your processes?
They provided a nice central place for us with a lot of
(01:05):
different types of functionality.
We found three different categories of business value.
One right out of the gate was business intelligence.
The fact that we could start centralizing our data gave us a
lot more insight into what was happening in our business
processes and gave the executives and management a lot
more power to make better decisions about what to do next.
(01:25):
So Nuvia started, of course, as a small company.
It now has 40 locations and it'sgrowing.
Take us on that journey. That journey actually started
more administratively than it did from a tech or a dev
perspective. The management or the upper
executives want more visual elements that really help them
(01:46):
make decisions, like dashboards and in business intelligence and
things like that. Obviously when you get into
those kinds of conversations, you can't get data unless you
have good applications to give you the data.
And so it turned into a broader conversation of is there
something out there that could sort of be a catch all where we
could start centralizing all of our processes and operations.
(02:07):
So it's it's been a great gap filler, if you will for us as
well as a great business intelligence tool.
And then we're using it in quitea few other ways as well.
You started with over 80 applications.
Every location and every department in the company was
basically just choosing applications as on an as needed
basis to to do the things that they needed to do.
(02:29):
Lots of different spreadsheets, whatever approach they could
find, they would just pick it and use it because there was no
centrality to any of those concepts.
And so that's you can see how you can quickly get to over 80
applications. How did all of this complexity
affect the business operations? There's two priorities
(02:49):
ultimately when it comes to our applications and use of
software. The executive side or UER
management side is really just about the data itself.
It became evident really rapidlythat just controlling the data
was kind of our number one priority.
Let's find out how to control the data.
And of course, one of the biggest wins out of Zoho is just
(03:10):
using the analytics tool becausethat gave us a place to start
centralizing data and realizing what we actually don't know in
the process. And so you have that side of it,
and then the other side of it isactually what's producing the
data. So what applications are getting
used? Are these applications we can
get the data from? Is it friendly to the end user?
(03:30):
And from those two worlds is where that complexity comes
from. And they're really two different
conversations to have at the endof the day, which I think is
where a dev or an IT team can really come into play and have
have some real strength and power in that conversation, as
long as that's what their mission is, is to kind of bring
those two worlds together. That aspect of collaboration
(03:55):
between the IT side and the business side is so important
because of course, business leaders know what they need from
an operations perspective, but they don't necessarily
understand all the insurance andouts of the technology.
And the IT folks don't know what's in the heads of the
business leaders. So how did you bring people
(04:19):
together to make this collaboration work?
We discovered quickly that one of the missing gaps between the
IT team and the executives or the business operators was that
collaboration was that understanding of the two two
different business models, if you will.
Here you have all these locations that are successfully
doing business and bringing smiles to patients lives and
(04:42):
they're seeing the success and the reward and the outcomes.
And then here comes along this IT team and what is it that
we're supposed to bring to the table?
And often times an IT team can be seen as a detriment or
slowing us down a little bit. So having that conversation
between those two sides, if you will, becomes a an interesting
(05:02):
challenge. And I think oftentimes companies
miss out on some of the connecting tissue between those
two things. In the Sprint or agile world
that I come from, we would call that a product owner or someone
that's responsible for having a conversation between the two
sides and taking the business knowledge and interpreting it
into IT or developer knowledge so that it can be developed in
(05:26):
effective and efficient way. And often times a role like a
product owner is not even considered real.
It's something overlooked quite a bit.
And in our company that that wasnot a role that was filled.
And so we sort of had to naturally start filling it.
We chose an approach called the customer journey approach or the
OR the user journey approach, which is more committee driven
(05:47):
than it is an individual or a position where we can bring
people from various departments to talk with different people on
the IT team. So we both come to the same
understanding. So that's how we've kind of
dealt with some of those collaborative complexities that
way by using more committee based knowledge and
collaboration. You use the term journey, and
(06:09):
that kind of collaboration for most organizations definitely is
a process of getting there. Absolutely.
You have to be consistent with quite a few things and there are
journey frameworks out there in the CX world that you can read
up on. A lot of them kind of mirror the
actual agile processes or frameworks where you actually
(06:33):
have meetings that you schedule every so often, every two weeks
or one week or whatever your cycle is on.
And so following a framework I think is very productive and
being consistent with it and making sure that everyone
understands they're on the same team.
So often a dev team and a department can think they're on
different teams or they can feellike they're sort of enemies to
(06:55):
one another. One's bogging down the other
because they don't understand each other.
So I think overcoming that concern is huge in the
collaborative world between different departments,
understanding that we're all on the same team with the same goal
and the same mission, and that'sto bring smiles to people's
faces. Once you can overcome those
kinds of concerns, it's pretty amazing how productive a meeting
(07:17):
or a collaboration can be and how actually enjoyable it can
be. Frankly, at the bigger the
company gets, the more time I think you do have to spend on
relationships and understanding one another and I guess the
emotional intelligence of that process.
And so the bigger the company gets, I think the harder it is
to keep those connecting tissuestight and and close together.
(07:40):
Parl. Earlier you described data as
being the core. Can you elaborate on the role
and importance of data in driving this transformation?
I think we fell back to data at the end of the day because that
is really sort of the doctrine by which companies run.
(08:03):
I think it's really easy for people in a bubble like CEO's or
administrators or like just an IT guy or dev guy to be in a
bubble and see things like, oh, look how sexy that interface is
and think that the sexiness of the interface is what makes a
great product, right? And so you can get a lot of
confusion about what is important.
(08:24):
And of course, a user interface is always really important, but
is not really the most importantthing, right?
You can get by with a less sexy interface as long as the data
it's producing is valuable to you.
So we learned quickly that thosepriorities needed to become very
secondary to the idea that data is our first priority,
regardless of how good looking the interfaces or any of the
(08:47):
window dressing about how we getit, as long as it's easiest, as
easy as possible for the user togive it to us and more
importantly easy and interpretable to give back to
the executives in a digestible way.
So that data is really a lot more important than any other
consideration at the end of the day.
So the data is not just about producing pretty reports, but
(09:12):
actually serving to move a business operations forward.
Correct. And it's so easy to get caught
in the fray of the of understanding that the fray of
if it doesn't look pretty, is itaccurate?
You know, and I guess to some degree trust is a big issue with
that. Trusting the data.
I guess AUI comes in a little bit because it provides a trust
(09:35):
level to data, but you can have the best UI on the planet and
still have really crappy data. So for us, we would we focus a
lot more on data integrity now than anything else and then
we'll try and make it as pretty as we can after the fact.
Earlier you described this largeapplication sprawl.
(09:56):
Tell us about that and how you got your arms around it and
simplified. There's so many conversations
surrounding all those applications, why they chose
them, what data they were using them for, what process and what
data lives behind it. And to get through all those
conversations is sort of step one.
(10:17):
And then, and then the calculus of all that was what is really
the most important because therewere conversations about
interfaces and doesn't run on a mobile phone, etcetera,
etcetera. And the calculus of all that was
the data is what's important. And knowing that it really
simplifies our perspective on how we migrate and how we look
at applications. So our first question is, can we
(10:39):
get the data right? So that changes the conversation
entirely as to well, we need to get rid of this app.
Well, that's pretty aggressive. Like can we get the data from
the app because maybe we can live with that for a little
while before we get rid of the app.
So it really does change the whole conversation and our
priorities and it allows us to be a little a little more agile
(11:00):
with all the applications that are being used.
And if if we can't get the data or the data is not accurate or
providing us with data integrity, then we need to look
at something more aggressive or centralizing it into something
like Zoho. That's interesting.
So the data became your reference point for making
technology decisions about what to keep, where to change, and it
(11:26):
sounds like this was a very measured approach, again based
on the data as the reference. We've kind of ended up there.
I mean, it's still an experiment, if you will, but it
is simplifying our thought process and it seems to make
just common sense. It's intuitively makes more
sense because the conversations were really convoluted and hard
(11:47):
to understand how to prioritize before that.
And so now that we've settled inon this one point of reference
for an application, it just makes all of our conversations
that much better. And we're not shaking other
departments to the core by telling them we're stripping
everything they're using tomorrow, right?
And so there's a lot less fear in it, a lot more trust in the
(12:08):
process. And and a lot of departments
understand that now that we can't get the data, we have to
have a more aggressive conversation about replacing and
they're OK with that because we've walked through the process
from that perspective. And then ultimately, you moved
from this broad application sprawl onto Zoho as a unified
(12:30):
platform. We did have some really good
successes with CRM. We do use Zoho projects and
other tools. We had success with Click and
some other communication tools that are in there.
And again, when we made data thepriority, we learned that we
don't necessarily need to scrap someone's Google Sheet or we
don't necessarily need to scrap a certain application just
(12:53):
because we now have a central tool to use because that central
tool can sometimes make it more complicated, not less, and make
the data harder to understand oraggregate.
And so we've we've learned how to scale Zoho at a proper pace,
I guess is the best way to put it.
Can you describe how you went about centralizing the processes
(13:17):
and the data? With a company like ours, it was
growing so fast there. No one really had their arms
around data. And so we've really had to kind
of chunk that out and take one big piece at a time.
So we have other CRM data, we have other applications data.
And that did turn into US deciding that it was going to be
really important to set up what we call middleware, which is
(13:38):
just some servers in the cloud where we can set up some stacks
that will do certain things, hitAPIs, get data, aggregate data,
push data, have web hooks, push data to us, right?
Just a nice space where we couldcatch anything that Zoho
couldn't get or that other applications couldn't get for
us. And we learned early on that
(13:58):
that was absolutely necessary. And we continue to build on that
stack as well. So that's an ongoing process,
but that's kind of where we ended up.
So we ended up with Zoho, A middleware stack, and then all
of our other apps where we can share data in between them.
And the more we get control overthat data, the better we can
(14:19):
make a decision about where we put the next upgrade or build
out the next application that we're going to use.
So it's been really satisfying process to help everybody come
together and say, you know what data is the most important thing
here. And if everybody agrees on that,
now the application conversationis much different for everyone
involved and not just US againstthem again like we talked about.
(14:42):
As you were undergoing this simplification process, how did
you maintain compliance and dataintegrity?
And of course, you're a healthcare company, so that's
very crucial to you. We did need to make sure that
Zoho was compliant with all of its data requirements and rules,
(15:03):
which they have all those security policies in place for
us. The middle where we've obviously
made made sure that's protected with security and everything
else that has all the chief nerdstuff to go with it, if you will
so you. Started with over 80
applications. How many do you use now?
We don't keep a count, and we don't need to count because
everything we're doing right nowis just a simpler process for
(15:26):
us. So life is just easier.
Yeah. How important is the platform
aspect of Zoho to this simplification process?
The Zoho platform approach has been more beneficial
administratively more so than technically.
So administratively, the fact that Zoho is a has a very low
(15:46):
cost point. They have a really nice program
that gets all users access to all products so that you can
kind of pick and choose or figure that out as you go.
Administratively. It makes that really nice and
cost justifiable to live in thatplatform so that you can be more
agile with it. So I think the platform
perspective, because they made it so flexible administratively
(16:08):
has been very nice. How did Zoho's platform
flexibility enable you to start in one location and then scale?
Zoho really gave us the ability to to kind of carve out a
process, build it in Zoho and then train the staff at a single
location on that process. And then we were able to observe
(16:31):
that and refine it. And once it's working well, we
were able to roll that out to other locations.
So that worked really well for us.
How did Zoho give you the confidence to rely on their
platform to such a large extent?Confidence for us was a building
process. You really don't gain confidence
until you use it. And so we really just needed to
(16:51):
jump in, dip our feet in it, getthe data in business analytics,
try building a few things in CRMand and our confidence grew from
use. And how about the aspect of
being able to share data among the applications sitting on that
platform? That's one of our top three
(17:11):
considerations. Can we build it in Zoho?
Is that because it will be central to all of our users
right out of the gate and, and can we build it better than
what's already being used? And so that becomes an easier
conversation to have because Zoho has an easy building
platform, especially when you'reconsidering things like CRM and
we have used Creator for a couple of different applications
(17:33):
that gets a little more complicated.
But because that's there and available and it's not like
we're paying a bunch of extra money to add a new process to
it. It's just built in now.
It's just a common part of our conversation.
Should we do it in Zoho? Do we need some middleware for
it? Or is the current application
we're using sufficient for now? It gives you that flexibility to
(17:55):
make choices as you go, rather than one huge project.
That's right, especially as a consideration against custom
built applications and things that would be a much bigger and
more expensive to build for sure.
What benefits have you seen by undertaking this simplification
(18:17):
process? The company's successful, we're
bringing more smiles to faces ofpatients and that our end users
are loving the products. Sounds to me like you're
describing 3 benefits. There are hard financial
savings. There is employee happiness, if
(18:37):
we can put it that way, and better customer experience.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
Change is always hard. How did you manage expectations
and gain buy in among employees at the company?
The more transparent you are, the more honest you are, the
(18:57):
more you eat crow. When you make a mistake and can
take the blame, it keeps those conversations more real and
truthful and transparent. And I think the more the better
your collaborations, I think thebetter the entire experience is
for everybody in that process. Now you've been through it, what
advice do you have for other business and technology leaders
(19:18):
who are facing this kind of journey?
Good collaboration, making sure that you have good connecting
tissues. I like to call it between
business departments and an IT or developer department and
consider making data their firstpriority.
Beyond that, I would say have fun and collaborate a lot.
Parl Johnson, chief nerd at Nuvia, smiles.
(19:40):
Parl, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us.
Yeah, it's been fun.
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