Adelante Healthcare sheds paperwork, creates financial reports in under an hour

Adelante Healthcare was established in 1979 by a group of community members in the rural communities of Surprise and El Mirage, Arizona, who saw that the healthcare needs of local farmworkers were going unmet. The humble beginnings of that first community health center in El Mirage formed the roots of the organization’s belief in providing sustainable healthcare. Today, the organization continues to offer patients affordable healthcare of the highest quality at nine Central Arizona locations. 

As part of Adelante’s mission of improving access to care, CFO Angela Robinson oversees all fiscal functions, ensuring the company makes sound financial decisions and can continue supporting patients and employees of the community health centers. 

Robinson realized that the company’s multiple on-premises financial systems—Sage 500 for finance, BizNet for reporting, and Excel for budgeting—were no longer the right fit for the growing organization. The IT department shouldered a burden of constantly maintaining the on-premises servers, and “Excel was a huge, nightmarish workbook that we had to constantly update and worry about formulas being messed up,” Robinson says. Managers did double the work to get budgets approved with the finance team because there was no way to manage budgeting online. 

Between network outages, depleted IT resources, manual paper processes, and heavy Excel work, Robinson decided the finance operation needed to move to the cloud.

Adelante Healthcare chose Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM because they met the organization’s requirements and surpassed the team’s ease-of-use expectations. It was critical for Adelante Healthcare that the system it adopted would eliminate manual processes. Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM provided the team with a single cloud solution to automate accounting and purchasing and integrate financial budgeting and reporting.

Financial reporting and bank reconciliations improved tremendously by moving to Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM. Financial statements used to take days to generate. Now, reports are automatically generated within the hour and sent to department managers. Adelante slashed the processing time needed for bank reconciliations—from four days to a half-day at most. 

Having a digital purchasing system has been a huge time-saver for Adelante as well. Frontline clinical employees can place orders online that are immediately sent to their suppliers. Without the slow paper process, staff can restock medical supplies much more efficiently.

Budgeting became an easy process for Adelante with Oracle Cloud EPM. Managers have access to their budgets online and make adjustments as needed, without scheduling multiple meetings with finance teams and then having back and forth email approvals. 

Lastly, the month-end close process is much more efficient now with Oracle Cloud EPM. Because of the simplified process, it takes one to two fewer days to close the books. 

Overall, Adelante accomplished its goal to move to a cloud-based financial system and eliminate paper-driven and manual processes. Both the finance and IT departments have seen significant time savings through the adoption of Oracle Cloud, modernizing their systems so they can support the organization as it continues to grow. “The way the organization is now moving is amazing. We’re looking at moving everything to the cloud, wherever we can,” says Robinson. 

Adelante Healthcare chose Alithya for the implementation, which was completed on time despite transitioning to a fully virtual implementation during the pandemic. “I would recommend them to anyone that’s going through an implementation,” says Robinson.