Achieve Australia
A shared mailbox of NDIS notifications, routed automatically
- NDIS & Disability
- 9 notification types identified and routed without a human
Achieve Australia processed NDIS claim notifications by hand: opening every email, identifying its type, matching it to one of four geographic clusters and routing it to an admin. TechRam built Azure Functions that do all of it, with a weekly audit report, inside Azure's free monthly grant.
9
notification types identified and routed without a human
4
geographic clusters matched from the subject line
Zero
notifications opened by hand to triage them
The organisation
Achieve Australia manages NDIS claim notifications across several geographic clusters, with admin teams processing email from both the PACE system and the legacy Portal. Nine distinct notification types, and a mandatory tracking requirement for every participant interaction.
A missed notification meant a missed service booking, and a missed service booking meant unclaimed revenue.
Where it started
Every incoming notification had to be opened by hand, identified by type, matched to one of four clusters — Red, Blue, Green or Purple — and routed to the right admin. Tracking happened in personal spreadsheets and ad-hoc email chains.
The PACE transition made it worse. PACE and the legacy Portal generate notifications with different subject line formats, so consistent identification meant reading each email individually. The admin team’s own description of the problem was the clearest statement of it: they did not want to miss anything.
What we built
Azure Functions covering the whole lifecycle of a notification, from arrival to weekly audit.
- Notification intake detects the new email, parses the subject line across both PACE and Portal formats, determines the participant’s cluster, creates a labelled Planner task assigned to the right admin, and posts to Teams
- Completion sync detects when a task is marked done and sends the confirmation
- Weekly audit compiles the activity into an Excel report stored in SharePoint and posts a summary to Teams
They run on a consumption plan inside Azure’s free monthly grant, so the only Azure charge is the storage account every function app needs.
Where it went
Notifications are identified, routed and tracked without anybody opening a mailbox to triage them, and the weekly audit answers the question the team was actually worried about: whether anything had been missed.
Common questions
01. What does it run on?
Azure Functions on a consumption plan, working with the Planner, Teams and SharePoint Achieve Australia already had. The functions run inside Azure's free monthly grant — the only Azure charge is the storage account every function app needs.
02. What made the notifications hard to identify?
The PACE transition. PACE and the legacy Portal generate notifications with different subject line formats, so consistent identification had meant reading each email individually — nine distinct types, across four geographic clusters.
03. What does the admin team do now instead?
Nothing at the intake end. A notification is detected, its subject line parsed across both formats, the participant's cluster determined, and a labelled Planner task created for the right admin and posted to Teams, without anybody opening a mailbox to triage.
04. How does anyone know nothing was missed?
A weekly audit function compiles the activity into an Excel report stored in SharePoint and posts a summary to Teams. That was the question the team was actually worried about: a missed notification meant a missed service booking, and a missed booking meant unclaimed revenue.
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