How Sydney home care startup HomeMade saved its customers millions with SAP BTP

Older Australians have started to increasingly move towards in-home care instead of traditional care facilities, with the Australian government now providing financial support for those who meet specific criteria. 

Traditional care providers typically manage these funds, where they build plans and assign caregivers based on a customer’s budget.

Sydney-based home care startup HomeMade presents itself as a disruptor in that space, having developed a solution that enables its customers to oversee their spending and have more control over which providers they would work with. 

HomeMade’s platform, built on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), aims to provide efficiency, flexibility, transparency and ease of use for customers, all in a scalable model that would grow with the company. 

50x growth  

The BTP implementation has helped HomeMade grow its customer base from 400 to 2500, while also helping save $14 million worth of funding for its customers that has been redirected to their care and services. 

Customers can see all their available funding, as well as what comes in and out of their accounts in real time. They can also onboard service providers more easily, giving them complete autonomy to self-manage. 

The company landed on SAP BTP to provide enterprise-grade products like security, a portal service, an integration service and the ability to scale with the company as it grows. 

“We wanted a solution that would give us that ability to scale rapidly and with confidence knowing that the rails weren’t going to fall off, because to be digitally enabled is what makes us different,” said Laura Westhorpe, HomeMade general manager. 

The solution has continued to evolve, with new features like SAP’s AI business services to read documents like invoices. Gradually, HomeMade plans to add some more automation and self-service capabilities. 

BTP has also enabled HomeMade to leverage even more AI solutions and more capabilities down the line to help simplify processes as the solution evolves. 

HomeMade’s platform is a React Native open-source Cloud Foundry runtime service, which is also hosted locally at AWS in Sydney. 

Through SAP Integration Suite, HomeMade can not only integrate with its environments like its ERP, but also can use APIs to talk to external services and manage data. A HANA data storage solution also supports reporting analytics needs over a long-term period. 

One example of HomeMade’s success was one customer that started out calling the support team every day, feeling insecure at home, not confident about the situation and didn’t have access to the community. 

As she got used to the platform, the customer now sends emails with photos instead of calling the team for one hour every second day and has talked about how she has regained confidence as she now has more control over her care and funding. 

The customer works with support workers that are aligned to her interests and preferences and has even rejoined the community where she lives with more confidence and empowerment to live the rest of her life. 

SAP BTP has enabled HomeMade to achieve its goal of giving older Australians a sense of agency, control and choice around what support looks like and what is meaningful for them. 

HomeMade has also grown its team from six before it adopted SAP BTP to over 100 today and is continuing to attract new people to the sector. 

How SAP BTP has benefited other organisations  

SAP BTP is a key topic at the Mastering SAP Collaborate Event in Melbourne on 22-23 May 2024. Hear from fellow end-users on their real-world experience with SAP BTP including Frucor Suntory and The Royal Eswatini Sugar Corporation, as well as BTP experts on how to make the platform work for your organisation.