Alpine View Lifestyle Village Spritely

Alpine View Lifestyle Village

The retirement village industry has grown more competitive over the years. New generation retirement villages have redefined what residents expect from their villages. As villages have become more sophisticated, some have struggled to keep up with increasing operational challenges.

hat other businesses develop properties, deliver healthcare, manage bookings, and operate pools, cafés, and movie theatres all at once? Today village operators need the help of technology platforms to manage village operations to the high standards their residents expect.

At Spritely, the talented engineers and product specialists have partnered with decades of retirement village experience to develop a single platform that simplifies village operations.

Spritely’s award-winning platform delivers efficient operations and happy residents. As a result (perhaps most importantly), executives get more time to focus on building new houses, adding new developments and increasing shareholder value.

Case in point, Alpine View in Christchurch. Alpine View is an established lifestyle village owned by Qestral Corporation. It was the first village in Qestral’s growing portfolio with 200 independent homes and 50 apartments.

In late 2019 Qestral’s Managing Director Simon O’Dowd (NZACA Chairman) and Executive Chairman John Ryder (Ryman Healthcare Cofounder) rolled out Spritely at Alpine View to streamline their operations and improve the resident experience.

Since then, Spritely has saved Alpine View thousands of hours of administration, tens of thousands of dollars in printing and distribution costs, and allowed head office staff to focus on the company’s multi-village development pipeline.

This case study explores how Alpine View uses Spritely to manage daily village operations, improve resident experience, and allow the Qestral’s management team to focus on developing new villages at multiple sites in Christchurch, Nelson, Hamilton, and Whangarei.

Resident Management

Alpine View maintains a lot of information about its residents. There’s the required stuff, like name, date of birth, and next of kin. Still, all the little pieces of information make dayto-day operations run more smoothly, like pet information, car registrations, and dietary requirements.

Before Spritely, Alpine View used a spreadsheet network to track all of its residents’ details. These spreadsheets were located all over the network, were rarely up-to-date, and often missing key information.

Using Spritely, Alpine View now has all of its residents’ information – from their GP’s details to their cats’ names – in one place. It’s simple to use and accessible from anywhere. Staff can easily

Continued from page 25. update information when it changes and even leave notes on residents’ profiles to make sure the team is up to date with developments like new health diagnoses, complaints, and holidays.

Activities

Alpine View is famous for its jam-packed activities schedule – more than 300 a month. Before Spritely, booking activities was an incredibly labour-intensive process which involved distributing monthly multi-page schedules to all 250 households, having residents highlight the activities they wanted to attend, then collecting all the schedules back and recording the bookings in an electronic system by hand.

The booking process alone took three staff members three full days each month – time they could have spent expanding the activities offering. Now, activities are added to Spritely (apart from recurring activities, which Spritely automatically generates monthly). At the beginning of the month, Alpine View staff make the activities public, and residents do all of their booking from their in-home tablets. These bookings are then automatically or manually approved, and individual schedules are generated (residents can see booked activities on their tablet).

A major benefit of self-booking is that cancellations and capacity can be handled in real-time. The booking process, which once took 72 staff hours, now takes only four. Research by an Applied Management student at the University of Canterbury found that Spritely’s activities module alone saves Alpine View 240 hours (1.33 FTE) per month, and over $30,000 per year in printing/distribution costs. This is a total saving of almost $100k per year.

Surveys

Among the essential things a retirement village can do to improve the resident experience is

At the beginning of the month, Alpine View staff make the activities public, and residents do all of their booking from their in-home tablets. These bookings are then automatically or manually approved, and individual schedules are generated (residents can see booked activities on their tablet).

to make residents feel heard and to act on the valuable data they can provide. Alpine View conducted an annual resident satisfaction survey – paper-based and time-consuming – which assessed the quality of everything from the activities schedule to the food in the café.

With Spritely, the village can send custom surveys to any group of residents at any time. The residents receive the survey on their tablets, with answers instantly transmitted to the admin portal where staff can view open rates, responses and export the data for analysis in a spreadsheet. Residents can also submit feedback anytime they like using the Spritely tablet.

This provides a readily accessible way for residents to log complaints, offer compliments or make suggestions. Spritely gives residents a voice so that management can quickly address concerns. With Spritely, villages can collect data more often, leading to happier residents and more informed staff. The cost of printing, distributing and collecting surveys is now a thing of the past.

Billing and Point of Sale

Most of Alpine View’s services come free of charge, but some require extra payment. Whether it is a dinner at the restaurant, some additional housekeeping, or a day trip to the farmers’ market, the village needed a convenient and adaptable way to charge residents for extras.

The previous system involved recording transactions manually on bits of paper and then collating those into a spreadsheet, which was then sent to the accounting team. Xero invoices were then generated, which clogged the system with hundreds of individual charges for meals and activities.

Spritely’s Billing and POS features consolidate all of that work into a central system that the village staff can use from anywhere to generate charges, make refunds and review accounts – all with a simple one-click export to Xero at the end of the month.

All of the village’s extras can be charged to residents from any internet-connected device on a Point of Sale system that takes just minutes to learn. The time savings for village staff and the accounting team are huge.

Noticeboard

Clear and frequent communication is one of the best ways to improve the resident experience,

Continued from page 27.

but logistical challenges make it almost impossible.

Alpine View’s system involved a weekly newsletter which would be printed and distributed by hand to every household. With Spritely, village staff now send updates to a digital noticeboard, accessible on every resident’s Spritely tablet.

News about maintenance works, activity cancellations, event changes and much more can be sent in less than a minute to every resident in the village. The noticeboard also hosts videos and live streams including everything from home fitness programs to AGMs.

Forms

Data collection and standardisation is a huge challenge for retirement villages – especially ones who want to harness their data to improve their operations. That’s why Spritely includes a flexible forms system.

Alpine View staff have created custom forms for everything from health & safety events to contractor induction, asset maintenance and waitlist management – these forms can be filled out using any phone or computer, and the data can be analysed by management to identify trends, create transparency and solve problems.

Forms are especially useful to ensure villages remain compliant with regulations and pass their audits with the help of detailed documentation that is searchable and quickly accessible. The tablet is eye-catching. Open home visitors pick it up straight away and have a hard time putting it down.

Knowledge Base

Policy and compliance burdens on retirement villages are heavy, and Alpine View is no exception. Before Spritely, their extensive library of policy documents lived in a cumbersome online system which was difficult to update, and which each staff member needed their own separate login for.

Now, they use Spritely’s Knowledge Base, which means that all of their policy documents are in the same place, inside a system they are already using. The policy documents have their own customisable permissions, flexible attachments, and built-in review dates. Staff no longer have to log into a separate system to consult their policies – they are right where they’re needed.

Medication

Alpine View residents using Spritely’s medication service receive their monthly medication in convenient pre-dosed sachets, making medication management easier while increasing adherence.

The sachet rolls are automatically delivered to residents’ doors by a Spritely partner pharmacist without any involvement from the village – it’s all taken care of. Alpine View residents signed up to

the service, say that it increases their satisfaction, makes their lives easier, and helps them stay healthy.

Documents

Retirement villages need to store thousands of documents to run effectively. ORA documents, health assessment, power of attorney forms, building refurbishment checklists and more all need to be stored at the fingertips of staff members.

Alpine View uses Spritely’s Documents module to store all their necessary paperwork in one place – tagged to the resident and easily searchable. The document database handles every kind of file the village needs, allowing staff to coordinate operations from anywhere.

Conclusion

at every level of its business. From waitlists to refurbishments, Qestral saves thousands of dollars and staff hours, making the operation of their villages simple and scalable.

Alpine consider all their residents to be salespeople. Effective real-time communication between residents, from residents to management, enhances the customer experience, reduces loneliness and motivates residents to recommend the village. The management team at Qestral can now spend time focused on their development pipeline, safe in the knowledge that village operations are running as efficiently as possible.

Qestral is a fast-growing retirement village operator, and they benefit from having a comprehensive technology platform to manage important aspects of their village operations.

If you want to improve efficiency in your villages so you can focus on your development pipeline, email to learn more about how Spritely can help villages save time and money. E: info@spritely.co.nz.

Visit angelbay.com/veggie for more information

protein packed Over 7 grams in every patty