eCapital Advisors Case Study: Saint Luke's Health System
“The eCapital team was very responsive and sensitive to our aggressive timeline. They knew what they were doing, and understood what we required for our accounting needs. We were very impressed with their professional attitude and the knowledge they brought to our project.” Saint Luke’s spokesperson
Solution Highlights
• Completed a large-scale, complicated implementation process in just 12 weeks
• Automated, real-time planning
• Elimination of more than 100 administrative redundancies and manual tasks
• Clear and accurate picture of key performance drivers
About Saint Luke's Health System
Saint Luke’s Health System, based in Kansas City, Missouri, is an award-winning non-profit health system that has earned national recognition for excellence in health care. U.S. News and World Report ranks it among “America’s Best” hospitals for heart, heart surgery, urology and gynecology”.
Organization size:
• Operates 11 hospitals, a Home Health and Hospice business, numerous physician clinics, and various healthcare aligned businesses.
• More than 8,000 employees
• More than 300 users of its financial systems
Implementation Team:
eCapital Advisors and Saint Luke’s Health System
Technology:
Cognos TM1, Cognos 10 B1
Business Challenge
Saint Luke’s has numerous separate entities using the same intelligence platform. And all shared the same problem: an outdated platform that no longer met their needs. They were maintaining two older systems for financial reporting, consolidation and forecasting: Cognos Finance and Cognos Planning.
The systems were riddled with issues and redundant work, making administration especially burdensome. Financial budgeting relied on IT to move data between systems and programs. The financial staff was having to divide budgets into six different planning models, each of which had to be updated separately. Many processes still depended on manual data input and jobs had to be run overnight, all of which combined to significantly slow down performance.
Saint Luke’s had an ambitious timeline for making system improvements. The eCapital team had helped Saint Luke’s in the past with some troubleshooting, and had made a good impression. It was time to call them again.
The Solution
eCapital and Saint Luke’s teams quickly and simultaneously jumped into this project from two directions, with the goal of taking the financial processes from outdated to state-of-the-art in just a few months. As one member of the eCapital team built a system to capture, consolidate and report monthly data, another was translating the planning function into TM1 so that budgets could be completed. Then the two systems were connected, giving Saint Luke’s more timely, flexible reporting and instant access to financial history dating back to 2003.
The Outcome
Saint Luke’s was moved to its more powerful and efficient platform in less than 12 weeks, in spite of the large-scale implementation. The two older systems were retired, and all of the data stored in a state-of-the-art business analytics tool.
One immediate benefit was with Saint Luke’s most challenging reports. Once awkwardly produced by exporting data into Excel, they are now generated virtually error-free by TM1. Entirely new reports are also now possible, and ad hoc queries to look at data are a thing of the past.
Saint Luke’s now boasts a nearly real-time planning environment, and a budget model that is consolidated into one unit. Today, finance operates independent of IT. Being able to instantly see the impact of updates is completely new to the Saint Luke’s team, who were used to waiting for updates.
Users also benefit from enhanced functionality and performance. The Saint Luke’s team is finding its new budget system easier to troubleshoot. With all the data input into TM1, information can be seen instantly without taking the time to load individual cubes to see what’s going on behind the scenes. Upper management is most excited by TM1 web, which enables them to quickly move the dimensions so that they may clearly see what’s driving performance.
Saint Luke’s now has the ability to react to changing GAAP reporting requirements, which was not possible with the legacy reporting system. Cognos TM1 has allowed Saint Luke’s to create a complete package of fully automated, GAAP required, financial reports, as well as analytical reports that combine general ledger data and complex ratio analysis on the same report.
Best of all, migration to the new platform significantly reduced administrative maintenance, with the elimination of more than 100 redundancies in Cognos planning administration and system links.
Future Plans
With this new flexibility and ability to see information from fresh perspectives, Saint Luke’s will continue to create new analytical reports and develop new ways to convert “data” to “information”. Using Cognos TM1 and Cognos BI, Saint Luke’s is redefining its report delivery mechanism to allow users faster access to relevant information to aid in operational decision making.
