A Case Study in Digital Transformation
How Orion used Salesforce to rebuild custom legacy infrastructure for a leading dental payments firm
The Project
Under the leadership of CEO Paul Kaiser, DentalXChange faced the overwhelming task of modernizing its antiquated, opaque legacy systems. The company had a history of successes, alleviating the notoriously painful experience of dental billing with a blend of software innovation and a customer experience focus.
But to continue down that path, it needed a bold change - and also patience.
With a string of digital transformation successes for healthcare, life sciences, and health-tech firms, Orion was the perfect match for DentalXChange.
The primary challenge was that DentalXChange's legacy systems were a "black box" - a mountainous, decade-plus of technical debt. A lack of transparency and customizability handicapped the management of customer data, billing processes, and sales reporting. The entire company felt this lack, from sales to marketing to accounting to customer experience. The complexity of the digital transformation was compounded by the need to unravel these legacy systems before implementing Salesforce.
Orion spearheaded a comprehensive Salesforce implementation, focusing on unraveling the legacy systems to pave the way for a seamless integration of Salesforce. This project involved:
Reverse engineering the "black box" to understand and reorganize the underlying processes.
Implementing Salesforce Service Cloud and Sales Cloud to manage customer relationships and sales pipelines effectively.
Enhancing reporting capabilities to provide strategic insights to both the sales teams and executive leadership.
The implementation fundamentally restructured DentalXChange's operational framework and created the possibility to provide not just better but entirely new categories of services to customers. Specific results included:
Streamlined operations and improved efficiency in product launches and billing processes.
Enhanced strategic decision-making through improved reporting capabilities, providing insights into marketing campaigns, sales efforts, and customer acquisition costs.
A significant cultural shift towards embracing digital transformation across the organization.
In the immediate aftermath of the project with Orion, the work lives of multiple DentalXChange executives in sales, marketing, customer experience, and IT, have been made easier. The same is true for their teams. As Associates discover new opportunities to create impact, both Orion and DentalXChange anticipate that the company will as well. Meanwhile, the payoff for DentalXChange clients is already being felt.
The Moment of Truth
“What really reassured us on trust is any time Dan would step in - Dan really understood our process. He’d say, “We got this, we understand this, we’re gonna reorganize this.’ An the we’d step back knowing we were in good hands.”
Trust came partly out of the Eureka moment, where DentalXChange realized that Orion had deferred a substantial deal because they - thanks to the insight of Ellen Williams, Orion's Directory of Advisory Services - that DentalXChange wasn’t ready. Orion later built on the trust created at that moment, through the implementation work of Dan Farrugia and his team. New ways of reporting and customer management, new processes uncovered - all of these meant constantly devising new innovations. Dan and his team built and kept trust over and over again.
The Eureka Moment
“Our system was a black box...Orion absolutely reverse-engineered everything”
A huge realization struck CEO Paul Kaiser in a conversation with Dan Farrugia at Orion - the first step was to reverse-engineer everything. This was the defining realization at the project's inception - the need to overhaul its legacy systems by figuring out exactly how they worked, step by step, piece by piece. That detective work also called for a non-trivial Netsuite implementation - before a Salesforce implementation happened, the data had to be just right. In this way, a series of Eureka moments ensued. Each one indicated that the digital transformation of sales, marketing, support, and services would have to be postponed to be done correctly.
The Red Moment
“Even if we had a hiccup, or had to reset our expectations, they went above and beyond to ensure that we had everything we needed before we launched...there was nothing missed.”
Because of the depth of the transformation, affecting operations, accounting, sales, marketing, customer service and the entirety of customer experience, there were multiple red moments related to surprise learning challenges. Ways of doing daily business that had been in place for years had to be relearned. Led by Orion principal and COO Dan Farrugia, the approach was to treat each such moment as critically important, an opportunity to deepen the transformation, and build trust.
The Ribbon Cutting Moment
Because of the universality of Orion’s solution for DentalXChange, it tied all departments and processes together in Salesforce. Everything had to be launched at once. Thus, the ribbon-cutting moment was dramatic and interconnected. Orion unleashed an entirely new system end to end. At that moment, DentalXChange became a smarter company - it changed the way DentalXChange executives did business. Insight and analysis reporting that had been impossible now happened in a few clicks. But more importantly, the three core revenue generation teams - Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success - instantly gelled in a way that had never been possible.
“I realized it before we even went live - this is gonna be a game-changer.”
The ROI Moment
Because of the enormity of this very recent project, the tangible ROI moment sits 1-2 years out from project completion in late 2023. Confidence in projected ROI, however, happened within weeks of the completion of implementation. This confidence is shared by DentalXChange’s CEO and executive team, Orion’s leadership team, and the private equity firm that holds ownership of DentalXChange. The possibilities for reimagining the ways that DentalXChange can shake up the dental billing industry are numerous - but even just sticking to business as usual, significant ROI on the project is inevitable.
“Within 2 years, we reach a break-even point. But you know, after that, it’s all upside. And along the way, as we continue to scale and grow, we’ll be able to add things in - we’ll be able to add in AI, and we’ll be able to integrate ... And so many solutions that the Salesforce platform offers that are just going to quicken our ROI opportunity, by just having a scalable platform in place that will then allow us to stack value adds over time and create more efficiencies. It’s going to be huge - we could never have done that in our old world.”
Contact us to learn how our experts can increase efficiency in your organization!