Industry: Healthcare
As legacy FTP processes start to degrade, they slowly consume more and more IT resources. Most companies don't recognize the true enormity of the problem until it comes to a head.
AnMed Health (Anderson Area Medical Center) recognized the inefficiency and risk of their file transfer operations and set out to find a replacement: GoAnywhere MFT.
Reducing Staffing Resources Needed to Maintain Transfers
AnMed Health was trying to get by with an FTP server that had a history of being unreliable. To make matters worse, only one network staffer knew how to set up the DOS batch transfers which made the entire process extremely vulnerable.
"Our old file transfer system did not offer automatic auditing," said Lisa Nanney, Senior Programmer/Analyst at AnMed Health. "Because we were not proactive, it often took a call from the vendor to discover there was a problem."
Nanney added, "When problems did arise, we had to wait for a network engineer to become available." This typically resulted in downtimes of hours or days.
Learn More: What's Your ROI for using Managed File Transfer?
A Sustainable Solution: GoAnywhere MFT
Nanney's primary goal was to find a file transfer replacement that her entire team could learn and maintain. Because GoAnywhere supports IBM i file transfers, her existing programmers could easily handle the requirements for both. Likewise, job auditing and simple troubleshooting played important roles in choosing GoAnywhere. In fact, according to Nanney, the debugger is their favorite feature. It allows the execution of tasks on a step-by-step basis to diagnose problems in a project.
→ Learn more about secure file transfer automation. ←
Last, but not least, was the need for system notifications. With GoAnywhere, Nanney's team is immediately alerted to file transfer problems when they occur. Best of all, when issues do arise her operations staff can then resolve the problem immediately.
"The Network Engineer we used to handle the FTP server spent at least 24 hours a month troubleshooting transfers," said Nanney. "He doesn't even touch transfers now unless we need connection assistance."
Dramatic Cost Cutting
Nanney had been tasked with eliminating the need for 3rd shift Data Center staffing. GoAnywhere not only made that possible but has saved programming, operations, and network staff over 500 hours a month.
The benefits didn't stop there. Nanney went on to automate many of their insurance claims and payment processing. Since being implemented, over 50 hours of Data Center time has been recovered in addition to accelerating the recoup of payments.
She even used GoAnywhere to replace their green-bar reporting with a process that sends reports to a network drive mapped to the IFS. This resulted in cutting green bar paper costs entirely along with yearly maintenance for "one dinosaur of a printer."
Nanney added, "We use GoAnywhere so extensively, it's hard to find a window of time for system maintenance."
Security Upgrade
Operational efficiency was not the only objective in AnMed Health's search for a new FTP solution. Nanney was looking to upgrade her operations to support SFTP and PGP encryption as well.
"Our old FTP server did not have SFTP, so everything had to be encrypted," Nanney explained. This was a problem since most of her vendors have migrated to SFTP.
"We do transfers with vendors now that would not have been possible without GoAnywhere," Nanney said.
Migrating with Ease
Allison Head, another Programmer/Analyst with AnMed Health, also spoke about their recent integration to Epic Software, a very common solution used in the healthcare field. Due to this shift, the health organization had a ton of new projects to set up – jobs, FTP files going back and forth, and billing statements. "It was a lot of revenue stuff, so it was very important for the files to go and get the replies back – it was business critical," Head stated.
This change in software also resulted in a migration from IBM i to Windows. AnMed Health made the change because their i series was only housing GoAnywhere and payroll, so when they decided to move their payroll to the new system, they decided to migrate GoAnywhere to Windows as well. Because GoAnywhere is platform-agnostic, the transition went smoothly, saving an estimated 500 hours of work for AnMed Health and its employees. Head said, "It was a lot of work, we had so many jobs to migrate, both schedulers and users – it was time consuming, but it wasn’t difficult." With this migration, GoAnywhere’s cross-platform capability was very important for the successful transition.
Since AnMed Health’s EPIC integration, they have continued to add and build new projects. "I know just for our EPIC jobs we have about 60 projects and multiple files within each one that go out daily."Head added. Not only has it saved time, but GoAnywhere has continued to make a powerful impact on the productivity of AnMed Health and Head’s day-to-day work activities. "It is pretty much what I do all day. It’s my system and I think it has made our file transfer processes run smoothly. It’s our go-to for FTP files and statements, bills, and things that often go out to vendors. All I have to do is one click if there’s an issue. It has made my job easier," Head said.
Head concluded by saying the following about GoAnywhere, "It runs smoothly, and we have complete confidence in our jobs and files getting where they need to go."