How the Royal Life Saving Society NSW has increased reporting efficiency by 70% with managed integrations

December 15, 2022
5 mins
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For many Australians, Royal Life Saving NSW (RLS) is a household name. Renowned for their incredible life saving work in the community, they’ve been working tirelessly for the last 125 years to prevent drownings and promote water safety across New South Wales. 

“We provide support and guidance on best practice in aquatic risk management, reducing the occurrence and seriousness of incidents.”  — Royal Life Saving Society

But what many don’t know is that up until recently, RLS relied on time-consuming, manual processes to keep their life-saving mission on track. We recently sat down with Nick Au, Aquatic Risk Services Manager at RLS, to learn how they’re transforming their approach to data capture and driving efficiency through managed integrations.

Saving lives through data

Nick and his team provide support and guidance on best practices in aquatic risk management. This includes regular site visits to waterways and aquatic facilities to conduct safety audits that help reduce the occurrence and seriousness of incidents.

Prior to working with Propel Integration Partners, these audits and checklists had to be manually loaded into their Salesforce org.

“It was a pretty time consuming, clunky process,” said Nick. “We would use an app that would create a PDF export. From there, we had to manually pick through the data in Salesforce and use Excel spreadsheets to create our reports.

The pain felt by this manual process was amplified by additional organizational challenges, like: 

  • Lack of internal resources: As a not-for-profit organization, RLS had limited internal resources. They also didn’t have the in-house expertise to create an integration between their app and their Salesforce org. 
  • Manual data processing: Sorting through the data was a slow, time consuming process. For Nick and his team, this meant more time sitting behind a desk and less time on the ground, assessing aquatic facilities.  
  • No real-time data: Without access to real-time data, analytics, and visualizations, it took weeks for RLS to efficiently drill down into their data to provide resources and support to aquatic facilities. 

Building a partnership: integration technology + expert support  

Without the internal resources to solve their integration challenges, RLS teamed with Propel Integrations in a fully managed integration partnership. 

“We’ve been working with Propel for over three years and I really can’t fault the team. From the start, it was a great partnership. The team is always there to assist and really easy to get in touch with.” 

Unlike traditional iPaaS integration solutions, Propel provides both the initial integration development and ongoing support:

  1. Integration technology: Utilizing the Propel Integration Platform, they created a seamless integration between RLS’ mobile app and Salesforce org, enabling real-time reporting and collaboration. 
  2. Expert support: As part of a fully managed integration solution, the RLS team also receives ongoing support—freeing up precious resources to focus on their mission, rather than troubleshooting technology issues.

“My expertise is risk management in aquatic environments. I'm not an expert when it comes to data and technology. I know what I want, but extracting it from our tool is a different story,” said Nick. “That's where Propel are great—they just make it happen. I can sleep easier knowing we've got a team of experts on our side. And that's priceless.”

The results: how RLS are raising the bar on aquatic safety 

With their critical aquatic safety systems connected, RLS aren’t only saving time and resources, they’re also getting more from their data, helping improve aquatic safety across the state.

“We’ve been able to achieve so much since working with Propel. It's allowed us to generate more business and raise our prices as we’re able to provide a better service to our clients.” 
  • Increasing reporting efficiency: Where it once took four days to conduct a safety assessment, now takes less than one day. According to Nick, it’s significantly changed the way they operate as a department. By cutting down on manual data loading, they’re able to spend more time on site, resulting in deeper, more impactful data.
  • Benchmarking aquatic safety: Each year, RLS collates their facility assessments and publishes a state-wide report on aquatic safety. Previously, it would take up to seven weeks to manually sort through the data to find key trends across the state. Now this can be done instantly, enabling Nick and his team to quickly jump on problematic trends before they become real issues.
  • Driving country-wide change: Prior to working with Propel, RLS were only able to benchmark aquatic safety across the state of New South Wales. Now, they’re able to easily drill down into the data to benchmark individual facilities against the rest of the country. According to Nick, it’s helped develop partnerships with local governments as we can provide local a customized benchmark report that shows how your aquatic facility safety compares to the rest of the state.”
“I’d recommend this to any organization: engage the right people to make it happen. Because the only way we got to this level is by working with experts to bring it to life. Otherwise we'd still be using Excel spreadsheets.”

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