CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I work for a nonprofit organization that delivers services both directly and indirectly to seniors. We use CiviCRM for most aspects of client interaction except for service delivery. Our existing service tracking software is expensive, inflexible, proprietary, poorly supported, poorly documented, there's no community to speak of, and if I'm completely honest - it's mostly rubbish.

What this software does that Civi doesn't is allow us to schedule and record the delivery of specific services to specific clients. We can define types of services which can be linked to different providers and funding sources so that at the end of each reporting period we can provide outcomes data to our funders. One twist is that we'd almost certainly have to duplicate one of the surprising strengths of our existing software: the ability to interact with touch screens and bar code scanners. We use this in certain situations where the client records their own services.

Here's what we need to be able to do with "CiviServe":

- Define types of services and link them to to contacts configured as funding source(s) and service provider(s)
- Define which types of organizations, volunteers, etc can provide specific services
- Define eligibility requirements for specific services (demographics, location, etc.)
- Create custom fields for services to record additional details. (like "meal type" for a meals on wheels service, etc)
- Schedule people to receive services, and assign the service to available organizations, volunteers, etc.
- Record contacts who've been denied access to services (including notes, reason for denial, etc.)
- Record the delivery of scheduled services (including batch entry)
- Display history of services on each contact's profiles
- Report outcomes by funding source, provider, date ranges, demographics, underserved, overserved, etc.
- Solid import/export capabilities for interacting with other systems which are often required by various funders.

And of course some modifications to CiviCRM in general:

- Integration of CiviServe with existing search, reporting, custom data, profiles, etc.
- Ability to create touchscreen and barcode scanner friendly profiles for kiosks and mobile phones
- Email notifications when activities and services are scheduled or assigned

The question is who would be capable of taking this on, and what kind of development resources are necessary for such a large project? For us to fund a substantial project isn't inconceivable given the cost of what we're currently using.

-n8

Thanks for the response. We did play around with CiviCase when it was first implemented (around v2.1 or so) with the intention of trying to use it to collect service data but found it kind of a stretch and maybe even a little too complicated for what we were looking to do.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle at the time was that configuring it meant writing or at least copying and modifying configuration files. Though maybe this has changed and we need to take another look. We did have some uses in mind for CiviCase for programs that function in a manner consistent with CiviCase's workflow, but for general service delivery we more or less just need something like a simple POS-type system.

Again, thanks for taking the time to reply. Based on your rates, I think that we could justify sponsoring the lion's share of the development IF we could replace our existing database. But we will spend some time exploring the functionality of CiviCase in the latest CiviCRM release before we go any further.

Cheers,

-n8