Case Study
Pequeno Príncipe Hospital combines agility and efficiency to scale donations
How the century-old hospital centralizes and automates 14 donation channels with Pipefy’s help
About Pequeno Príncipe Hospital
Founded in 1919, Pequeno Príncipe Hospital (HPP) is Brazil's largest children’s hospital, performing over 288k outpatient consultations and 20k surgeries each year. Its name matches the Portuguese translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous novella, The Little Prince.
Along with Pequeno Príncipe Colleges and Pelé Pequeno Principe Research Institute, the hospital integrates the Pequeno Príncipe Complex: a major resource for developingtreatments for children and adolescents in Brazil.
Challenges for escalating donations
HPP was created in 1919 with the goal of caring for children and adolescents who did not have free access to healthcare. Around 70% of the hospital’s care is for patients from Brazil’s public healthcare system: the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS). This creates notable financial challenges for the institution. Community support through donations has always been fundamental in ensuring the hospital is able to keep its doors open.
To manage the ever-growing and dynamic donation and fundraising arm while also continuing to support the hospital’s primary goal of offering excellent and equitable medical care, the New Projects department was founded in 2006.
Fundraising had always been the department’s main function, their outdated processes limited their success. For the first 10 years of the team, they worked with an outdated CRM and most internal processes were managed manually. Processes like sales (donations) funnel management, accounts receivable, and customer onboarding were managed separately through spreadsheets, email, and paper documents.
The hospital’s day-to-day operation, as well as the New Projects team’s attributions (and the number of donors) were growing every year, making the decentralized and manual management of these processes caused rework and communications challenges.
As a result, these processes became a major bottleneck for the organization. At the beginning of 2017, Pequeno Príncipe’s team started using Pipefy to improve their efficiency and get the team out from under the burden of manual processes and point solutions.
Until 2017, we needed to manually send emails to each of our investors. Each employee had their client portfolio and communicated over their own email address. This, along with our outdated CRM at the time, caused problems because if on that day the employee had to leave or was on vacation, we would lose all of that investor’s history.
Antony Assumpção
New Projects Coordinator
From disconnected systems to an agile operation
After implementing Pipefy, the New Projects department starting turning itself into an agile and efficient organization. One of Pipefy’s key features compared to other solutions is its flexibility and ease of use — especially for those outside of IT.
Currently, the New Projects team manages over 40 workflows in their organization. With Pipefy, they accomplished improving communication flows between multiple teams and automating processes that used to be manual.
HPP’s fundraising team uses Pipefy to complement their CRM to manage their new investors onboarding workflow. The process begins with prospecting and negotiating with new investors, then . After the partnership is “sold,” and, the Finance and Investor Relations teams are notified via Pipefy. The Finance team is responsible for creating a contract and processing all accounts receivable and. The Investor Relations team carries out the entire investor onboarding workflow after the deal is closed.
Thanks to Pipefy’s flexibility, the fundraising team can manage each of their task-intensive and unique workflows — like managing partnerships with major donors and legal entities.
The Employee Onboarding process is another example of HPP’s success with Pipefy for growing their team. As of early 2022, their team now has around 100 employees and forecasts to grow 30% in the year’s first semester alone with the help of Pipefy.
Currently, the hospital has 14 different fundraising fronts. In each of them there are several different teams involved in negotiations, post-sales relations, and finance. The organization and communication among teams and processes that Pipefy enables is essential in helping us be agile and efficient.
Denis Carneiro
New Projects Supervisor
The results: scalability and efficiency
At the beginning of 2022, the New Projects department reached 100% adoption of automated process orchestration with the use of Pipefy. According to Antony Assumpção, the department’s Coordinator, 100% of processes in the New Projects team are managed inside Pipefy. With standardized, centralized, and automated flows, the team can always work with efficiency and agility.
In conjunction with their new methodologies, Pipefy has helped the HPP team overcome the hurdles of remote work imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
For example: before the pandemic, managing new employee arrival was handled mainly with printed documents. Now, the process is managed end to end with Pipefy, collecting candidate information in forms and creating a funnel for selecting new employees. Denis Carneiro, New Projects Supervisor, says currently the team responsible for hiring new employees spends 50% less time on this process thanks to eliminating manual tasks — allowing them to focus on high added-value activities.
In addition, the process of attracting investors (in which Pipefy acts as a CRM) experienced some of the most positive results. Over the last five years since Pipefy’s implementation, the hospital managed to double the total of funds raised.
In parallel, the Finance team reduced their time spent on sales related tasks by 65% by automating tasks, such as sending monthly bank slips to investors.
Nowadays, with our customer base growing rapidly, we wouldn’t be able to give each customer the attention they deserve if we weren’t efficient. This would certainly cause our reinvestment rate to drop, and we’d lose a lot of investors.
Antony Assumpção
New Projects Coordinator
Next steps with Pipefy
Using Pipefy has already become part of HPP’s New Projects team’s culture, since all of their processes are managed in the platform. Their biggest challenge now is to expand its use to other departments in the hospital, spreading the agile culture through all of the Pequeo Príncipe Complex.
New departments are already starting to use Pipefy. One of these initiatives involves telemedicine service, where the hospital plans to use Pipefy for patient screening. By expanding the software to more departments, including hospital care, the Complex is on track to continue its digital transformation with Pipefy’s support and partnership.
