The American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) is the world’s largest professional membership organization for pathologists and laboratory professionals. The organization strives to “provide excellence in education, certification and advocacy on behalf of patients, pathologists and laboratory professionals across the globe.” With more than 100,000 members, the society has shaped the application and evolution of the pathology and laboratory medicine specialty since 1922.
Project Overview
ASCP provides education, testing and training materials, and certifications to its members via its website. These educational and testing materials are unique to each member based upon their role, experience, and classification as a pathologist or laboratory professional. When the member portal initially launched, members could log in and gain access to educational, training and testing materials most relevant to their current role and certification level. This process worked fine at first, however over time the limitations of the portal were quickly recognized.
ASCP member “roles” within the portal were constantly evolving due to new certifications, a desire for new products, and purchase history. The member portal was no longer able to keep pace and recommend materials the members needed and desired. These issues, coupled with an outdated website that featured poor user experience and navigation, presented a problem for ASCP.
The IT staff attempted to make changes to the portal when requests were made by sales and marketing however, with all of the rules and logic buried in code, changes, testing, and deployment took weeks and created a large backlog. With this in mind, the ASCP leadership began a search for a business rule management system (BRMS) that would help them stay current with the needs of their members and allow them to effectively recommend and sell them the most relevant products.
Solution
After reviewing the capabilities of several business rules management systems, the team decided to move forward with deploying InRule® due to its integration with their .NET technology.
ASCP had a wide variety of needs and requirements that they needed out of their BRMS selection. One of the most important requirements was that the BRMS integrate with their custom content management application and scale as ASCP grew its membership. Additionally, ASCP needed a solution that could be implemented quickly to deal with their large backlog of IT requests. Finally, the organization needed to be able to count on superior customer support, not only for implementation and product training, but also post-launch. On top of all of this, ASCP wanted to ensure that they were selecting a leading solution provider and product that would be a long-term partner of the organization.
According to ASCP IT Project Manager Robin Kraft, “Choosing InRule was easy. We had heard about them for years so we were very familiar with them. Their ability to integrate into our custom content management application and their ongoing support from the beginning of the sales process all the way through the product launch set them apart from other vendors.”
Results
The deployment of InRule has had a significant, positive impact on the custom content management application on ASCP’s website. The organization’s typical process initially involved building out hard-coded logic in their sandbox environment, user testing, and production deployment. This process used to take the entire IT staff a minimum of two weeks to complete. Since deploying InRule, a team of only two users can now make, and test, the logic changes in five minutes.
ASCP now runs over 100 rules that drive custom permissions, certifications, and product displays in the member portal on their website via the custom content management application. Typically, several hundred users are logged into the member portal at any moment and 5,000 users visit per day, so thousands of rules are running in a given moment.
As their membership grows and their user roles continue to change and evolve beyond their current 500,000 customer records, more rules are created and managed to better serve members. This is all made possible by the InRule BRMS which provides business users rich functionality and the ability to easily author, manage, test and execute rules and logic in custom applications – without code.
Next Steps
Moving forward, ASCP has plans to utilize InRule for revenue-generating projects. The first undertaking is a continued role- and permission-based project expansion. With expanded roles, permissions, and products, ASCP can further customize the user experience to drive even more value for each of its members. This effort can help drive membership satisfaction as well as revenue growth for the organization.
Additionally, ASCP has plans to start a migration project for stored procedure rules and logic that already exists in outdated systems and then to continue this process for new business. Finally, ASCP plans to grant marketing and business development user permissions so that they will able to create and run specific promotions and campaigns based on user roles. In doing so, ASCP can create tailored promotions and campaigns to specific members.
Lessons Learned
While moving through the buyer journey, application development process, and post launch phase, ASCP learned many lessons. When asked to share his opinion on the best part of working with InRule Robin Kraft said, “InRule and the support staff…have been so great to us. They are very responsive, we were very green when we started and they got us up and running with some pretty complex stuff very quickly. At all hours of the night you guys were working to help us out.”
