Transforming Business Processes: Kinark Customer Highlight Story

Kinark Child and Family Services (Kinark) is a not-for-profit organization committed to helping children and youth with complex needs achieve better life outcomes. Although Kinark has been providing children’s mental health services for decades, they only became known as Kinark Child and Family Services in 1983. In 2000, Kinark’s services expanded when they began providing interventions for children with autism. Today, Kinark employs over 700 staff and provides service to more than 9,000 children and youth annually in three program streams: autism services, community-based child and youth mental health services, and forensic mental health and youth justice services.

Kinark is committed to being a part of the picture when it comes to helping to meet the needs of children living with autism in Ontario, and their families. Their renewed focus on scaling-up access to services reinforces Kinark’s goal of providing accessible, flexible, responsive, and family-centred services to communities where there is a clear need.

Recent changes in the Ontario Autism Program now allow families to find service providers that work best for them while meeting the needs of their child(ren). This shift necessitated that Kinark become more agile and develop robust business functions such as sales, marketing, and business development.

As Kinark embarked on this new fee-for-service journey, it became clear they needed a CRM tool to effectively manage their sales and business development activities, including lead and opportunity management, as this was being tracked manually. Kinark conducted an environmental scan and assessment of available CRM platforms and vendors to find the right solution. When it came down to the RFP process, the final contenders were Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Ultimately, HSO and Microsoft were selected due to their combined industry expertise both in Canada and globally, their extensive experience with Dynamics implementations, and their more competitive implementation costs compared to Salesforce.

Prior to implementation, Kinark was tracking all leads manually. HSO adopted a phased approach to ensure user adoption and establish the right infrastructure, successfully delivering two phases so far.

Phase 1 leveraged the power of the D365 Sales hub to enhance lead capturing directly from Kinark's Autism Services website. This phase focused on laying the groundwork for future roadmaps and business processes, making lead capture and back-end lead tracking more efficient for staff.

Phase 2 focused on contract management, utilizing Adobe Sign for the creation and distribution of contracts for signatures. This phase greatly improved the contract management process for the Business Development and Finance teams and set the foundation for Kinark’s automated scheduling initiative in Phase 3.

Since implementing Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Kinark can now gather significant amounts of business data that helps them improve their processes, client experience, and inform future business decisions more effectively.

HSO successfully delivered phases 1 and 2 on time and on budget. The new system has saved Kinark numerous hours. Before implementation, drafting contracts and completing the contract process took 3 days; now, it can be done instantly with the click of a button.

Using Microsoft Dynamics clearly defined Kinark’s business process allowing them to meet the demand of their clients. Overall, Microsoft Dynamics helped Kinark eliminate more manual tasks and free up time to focus on what really matters, the families in need of support.