When growth outran the systems
Manning Support Services has spent fifty years growing from a small community counselling service into an organisation now supporting more than 2,000 clients across Support at Home and CHSP on the Mid North Coast of NSW — home support, volunteering, a building and maintenance team, a commercial kitchen turning out over 10,000 meals a month, and a full clinical team, all under one roof. That growth accelerated hard through COVID, when frontline numbers roughly tripled in a couple of months, and the systems underneath it didn't keep up. Frontline staff couldn't get a full view of a client's care plan without a manual workaround. Rostering ran with limited oversight, leaving little visibility into award-breach risk or genuine utilisation. And when a client's schedule changed, telling them relied on someone remembering to make the call — a process generating dozens of complaints a week and eating hours the rostering team didn't have to spare.
“There were lots of limitations. We were jumping in and out of the platform, and it didn't really do everything we needed, given how diverse the business is and how many programs we run.”
Closing the gaps legacy systems left behind
Manning brought its home support, volunteer, building, kitchen and clinical operations onto one platform in Lookout, then went looking for the gaps legacy systems had left unsolved for years. The standout fix: schedule-change communication. Working directly with Lookout's product team, Matthew Walton mapped out exactly what the rostering team needed and helped design an automation that raises a ticket the moment a rostered visit changes — a rostering officer ticks a box for SMS or email, based on each client's own preference, and the update goes out immediately. It's a small mechanic with an outsized effect: a job that used to depend on someone remembering who'd changed, what had changed, and finding time to pick up the phone now runs in the background, in minutes, for anyone on the team.
“It really shone through to her, and she felt so included.”
From a hundred complaints to five
The clearest measure of the change is the one the rostering team feels every week. Complaints about schedule changes — once as many as fifty to a hundred a week — now sit at around five. What used to demand a phone call, a clear memory of who'd been changed and when, and time the team rarely had spare, is now a process anyone on the team can run in a couple of minutes. The same appetite for automation extends to Manning's supplier network: with 1,000+ third-party providers and3,500+ purchase orders moving through the platform, Matthew describes the process as “not time-consuming, not convoluted — very user-friendly,” even at that scale. And when the platform didn't quite work for everyone — including along-serving, vision-impaired staff member who relies on assistive technology — Lookout shipped a fix within a week of being asked, so she could get live client information the same way as everyone else on the team.
Looking ahead
Manning switched on Lookout Assist's AI-powered care plans and forms in the weeks before this story was told, and the early read from care partners is that it's cutting hours of drafting time while improving consistency and clinical visibility for non-clinical staff. Matthew's team is also working with Lookout's Connected Care product group to shape how the platform handles Manning's large third-party supplier network as it grows — a natural next step for an organisation planning to migrate off its own custom-built provider portal.
