The story of Orchard Care Homes

The story

Orchard Care Homes is a care sector that excels in providing the best standards of care and health services on a long-term or short-term basis across the UK. Delivering award-winning purpose-built care services for over a decade, the organization is home to a multitude of individuals who require special care and attention. With a strong reputation and highly enthusiastic team, they continue to offer high living standards and improved care facilities to the occupants. They specialize in offering quality care services like specialist dementia care, residential dementia care, dementia nursing, short term respite, and ensure that the residents feel at home. Awarded with the prestigious Investors in People Award, the team continues to grow in a way that make the care homes a comforting place to live and sustain.

The organization has deployed around 1000 mobile devices across 40 care homes in the country. These devices host an application that helps the staff track daily activities performed by the residents. Activities such as meal in-take, walk, exercise, medication and everything related to each resident is recorded using this app. This helps the staff members to closely monitor each resident.

Managing 1000s of devices turned out to be a hefty task for the team. Users often fiddled with the device settings and Wi-Fi settings which the IT team had to revert back to normal every time, manually. Non-work-related applications were accessed during work hours which in turn affected the overall productivity. Ross Lee, the IT Infrastructure and Support Manager at Orchard Care Homes needed a system to control the device activities for better usability and productivity. The primary requirement was to lock the devices to a specific application so that other apps couldn't function in the meantime. Also, the team wanted to gain control over the device settings so the staff members couldn't modify it. Ross's hunt for an apt solution brought him to Hexnode.

Ross found Hexnode to be the perfect solution for all his requirements. Hexnode's single app kiosk mode allows locking down devices to a single app, thus preventing access to all other applications on the device. With this functionality, the devices can run only the application deployed by the organization.

Hexnode allows setting up Wi-Fi profiles from the MDM console so that the devices could be configured to the desired network without the need to enter a password. As the devices were locked down to a single application, the users were prevented from altering the Wi-Fi network set on the device. The team also aimed at restricting the device usage to certain functionalities and prevent modifications.

Device security and centralized management were amongst the other prime concerns put forward by Ross. They wished to manage the devices and push configurations centrally, and that was made possible with Hexnode. Security too was at par. The ease of implementation and the value pricing made Ross and his team move forward with Hexnode happily.

Hexnode proved to be the perfect choice for the team. All the primary requirements were seamlessly fulfilled from a single console. Ross was able to monitor all the 1000s devices, lock the devices to a single application, and ensure security concerns, all within the range of their pricing strategy. Hexnode was recommended to the team by one of their trusted service providers; it eventually turned out to be the best advice.

In a nutshell

Ross and the team had a great experience with Hexnode. The rich feature set and easy to implement structure greatly helped the team to organize and monitor the devices in considerably less time. Locking the devices to a single application directed focus to their host application, which in turn improved productivity. Moreover, the overall restrictions and centralized management saved pretty much of their valuable hours. Hexnode proved to be a wonderful decision in device management and Ross is happy to recommend Hexnode to anyone who asks for it.