Case Study: Australian Red Cross Blood Service

The prompt and decision

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service performs a critical role in Australia’s health system. It provides quality blood products, essential services and leading edge research to improve the lives of patients. A non-profit organisation with more than 4,000 employees, ARCBS must be ready to respond around the clock to deliver blood and search its extensive records for specialised requirements for particular patients. More than 520,000 Australians are blood donors across 120 collection sites every year.

Over a number of years, and utilising a number of HP Software solutions, JDS has helped the ARCBS adopt a lifecycle approach to quality, performance and availability of key business applications. This has enhanced the ARCBS’s IT capability and there is now a focus on extending the discipline of validation to other systems in the future.

Some of the IT improvements achieved include:

  • Obtaining a single point of truth to for application validation records
  • Unifying functional, performance and quality management
  • Gaining operational efficiencies by migrating to a paperless testing environment
  • Providing visibility into application code issues and the supporting information required for application vendors to ensure a timely fixes

This has provided a number of tangible business benefits such as:

  • Improved ability to meet regulatory audits by access to validation data in hours, rather than days or weeks.
  • Achieving the 99.8 per cent availability service level for the new National Blood Management System (NBMS)

The achievements in this project were realised through the timely and effective deployment of a number of HP Software solutions, including:

  • HP Quality Center as the overarching test management solution
  • HP QuickTest Professional for test automation driven out of Quality Center
  • HP LoadRunner for performance testing across a variety of protocols and application architectures
  • HP Diagnostics to triage performance bottlenecks in application code and configuration
  • HP SiteScope to collect real time metrics from various infrastructure components
  • HP Business Service Management to monitor the performance and availability of the critical applications from both the end user and infrastructure perspectives concurrently.