Brightview Senior Living brings its 47 communities together with real-time data

Founded in 1999, Brightview Senior Living builds and operates almost 50 senior living communities across the United States. “Our amenities and programs encourage residents to stay active and healthy,” said Tesh Patel, Corporate Director of Business Operations. “We’re built on the idea that a great place to work is a great place to live, so we try to give our 5,500 associates tools, opportunities, and encouragement to develop and grow their careers.”

In search of a scalable, user-friendly solution

As Brightview started to scale, it struggled to keep its dispersed network of communities and associates on the same page. “We share various data with both internal teams and external customers, and classic spreadsheets prevented us from fully and easily controlling access. There were numerous individual disparate processes within each community. There was no efficient way to consolidate all that data. So, we needed a more scalable architecture to ensure business continuity,” Patel added.

Brightview started looking for a solution. 

To achieve this, Brightview sought a reliable partner that would help them along this journey.

Diving deeper into Smartsheet

Brightview had already been using Smartsheet for a few years, with some of its operational processes existing within Smartsheet. They then worked with Invoka Consulting to maximize the use of Smartsheet premium apps and make it more efficient and scalable. Brightview decided to use Smartsheet for a COVID-19 vaccine tracker to monitor vaccinations among its residents and associates. “To track data for each community, we quickly needed a mechanism to collect a large source of data in a consistent format,” Collins recalled.

Control Center was the obvious solution, generating similar views for each community and aggregating data into one report. “This allowed us to slice and dice our data and provide role-based permissions to certain sheets. We were able to easily capture data and oversee the entire organization at a glance with executive dashboards,” Collins said.

Thanks to the implementation of Data Shuttle, the time-consuming data migration process that would have spanned a couple days was dramatically optimized to a few hours. Brightview also used the Pivot App to share reports to Power BI dashboards, making insights more accessible. 

“We were impressed by the quality of the entire implementation. We also saw time savings and improved visibility and outcomes,” Collins added.

Visibility that spurs improvement

The next project was a solution for monitoring quality assurance (QA) and compliance with a range of state and internal regulations. “These regulations change over time, and we need to swiftly and consistently update our surveys to align with changes in regulations,” Patel explained. “We also need to assess everyone from the dining staff to the Health and Wellness department and share the results with them in a streamlined way so that they can make timely improvements. Doing this with regular spreadsheets was too time-consuming and imprecise.”

So, Brightview relied on WorkApps to give its teams various levels of access, enabling those in charge of QA to edit compliance scores across different categories and allowing the rest of the team to preview data and insights. 

“With clear, real-time feedback, our staff can quickly spot areas of improvement and act,” Patel added. 

Brightview used Smartsheet Control Center to easily update regulatory changes across all communities. It also relied on DataMesh to resolve technical limitations and the Pivot App to come up with new metrics to create meaningful comparisons and spot new trends.

Brightening up everyone’s days

Next, Brightview relied on Smartsheet to generate and share so-called Bright Moments—content depicting various events in the lives of the residents like concerts and visits from grandchildren. “This way, we can easily keep their families and loved ones in the loop either through a newsletter or even a social media post,’ Collins shared.

Finally, Brightview decided to lean on Smartsheet for capital budget planning. “All of our 47 communities will require some sort of maintenance or renovations in the following years,” Patel explained. “How can one person realistically gather all of this information, prioritize it, and report everything to shareholders and executives?”

Today, instead of simple spreadsheets, Brightview collects data on budgetary needs through Smartsheet forms and aggregates the submissions through Dynamic View. “This way, we get a clear five-year picture of what our communities require,” Patel added.

Seeking endless possibilities

Looking back at the successful implementation, Collins gives credit to Brightview’s partner Invoka Consulting for laying a strong foundation. “Invoka took the time to understand our business and recommend configurations,” Collins said. “They provided best practice recommendations and continued to be strong partners. Their knowledge of the system is outstanding.”

Patel agreed, stating, “Invoka truly assisted us in creating a very thorough process. Through forms, dashboards, and reports, we've established a much more transparent capital process. This made budget planning significantly easier this year compared to prior years. Our transformation was remarkable.”

Today, Brightview is considering managing the requested projects within Smartsheet, bringing more transparency across the organization. “We’re even thinking of possibly automatically calculating forecasts on when the communities can expect the projects to be implemented,” Collins noted.