A Growth Opportunity — and a Problem
Pathways Community Services had been quietly growing for three years when they won a significant referral arrangement with a Local Area Coordinator network in the Geelong region. The opportunity: onboard 30 new NDIS participants over the course of a single month. The problem: their existing onboarding process took about two weeks per participant and involved paper service agreements, manual intake assessments, and a multi-step internal approval process.
“We had the staff capacity to support 30 new participants,” says CEO Rhonda B. “What we didn’t have was the systems to bring them on board that quickly without making mistakes on documentation or compliance.”
Redesigning Onboarding with Maxpilot
Working with Maxpilot’s onboarding team, Pathways rebuilt their participant intake process from scratch. The new workflow: a digital intake form sent to participants or their nominees before the first meeting; automatic generation of a service agreement based on the completed intake data; digital signature via email; and automatic creation of the participant profile, care plan template, and initial roster in Maxpilot.
What previously took a fortnight was reduced to a single structured meeting plus back-office processing time of about four hours per participant.
We onboarded 30 people in 28 days. Every single one had a signed service agreement, a completed care plan, and their first shifts rostered before we finished. That would have been physically impossible the old way.
Documentation Quality
Because the new process used structured digital forms rather than paper, documentation quality was consistent across all 30 participants. The compliance team reviewed every file before services commenced and found no missing signatures, incomplete assessments, or unsigned agreements — a first in the organisation’s history.
The Ongoing Effect
Pathways has retained the new onboarding process for all future participants. Average onboarding time has stabilised at 3–5 hours, down from 10–14 working days. The organisation has since taken on a further 40 participants using the same system.