Lexington Medical Center speeds finance functions with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Healthcare group drops paper-based processes, automates its procure-to-pay workflow, and makes data-driven decisions with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP.
“We asked ourselves, do we go to the cloud because all the new innovations are in the cloud, and the cloud positions us for growth? After we looked at the whole process, it was an easy decision. We had to go to the cloud.”
Business challenges
Tom Tan, the executive IT director at Lexington Medical Center, knew from the start that investing in electronic health record technology couldn’t be done in a vacuum. The organization was using a customized version of Oracle PeopleSoft for financials and supply chain management to support its Epic electronic health record system. In an effort to ease the move to PeopleSoft, the original IT team customized interfaces that made the PeopleSoft system look like its legacy platform, Meditech. “There's a joke that we had a Rolls Royce in the house, but we still treated it as a tricycle,” says Tan. Because the system wasn’t optimized to take advantage of PeopleSoft’s capabilities, there were still numerous manual workarounds and paper-based processes that made updating the system difficult. As business needs changed, especially those related to the procure-to-pay workflow—from inventory management, PO creation, and invoice payment—Tan was determined to move his organization to the cloud. “We knew we needed to go to the cloud because all the new innovations are in the cloud,” says Tan. “Business needs were changing, and I knew the cloud was the best way to meet those needs.”
Why Lexington Medical Center chose Oracle
As a long-time Oracle software customer, Lexington staffers were accustomed to using PeopleSoft. But Tan realized that as Oracle ramped up its cloud-based offerings, companies that were slow to modernize would be playing catch-up with the competition. For Tan, one of the most important factors for investing in Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was the ease of data conversion from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud. Another was the notable improvement in reporting capabilities.
But one of the most persuasive points was Oracle’s commitment to the healthcare industry—in particular its acquisition of Cerner and the development of healthcare capabilities in Oracle Cloud ERP, SCM, and HCM applications. “Oracle is spending a lot of energy now in healthcare and there's a lot of opportunity for making sure we can improve the delivery of healthcare to patients,” says Tan. Gaining buy-in from Lexington’s leaders was no easy task. Tan worked hard to bring decision-makers to industry events where they could network and hear about the benefits of the cloud-based system from other users.
Results
Lexington Medical Center migrated from Oracle PeopleSoft to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP using Oracle Consulting’s Oracle Soar accelerators. This automated the upgrade to Oracle Cloud by extracting data from PeopleSoft and providing standard data mapping, thus reducing data conversion efforts by 40%. Tan’s primary goals were to shift away from heavy customizations and empower business owners to make decisions more quickly, and base those decisions on real-time data. By automating the procure-to-pay workflow, staff could track details in real time and provide management with visualizations of the workflow.
Prior to implementing Oracle Cloud ERP, Lexington Medical Center’s expense report process was paper-based, making it difficult to validate approvers or track spending limits. Now employees route their reports to the proper approvers, then to payables for disbursement. This gives managers a full audit trail for every report. Lexington Medical reduced employee expense reimbursement waits from weeks to days, while at the same time systematically enforcing spend policy. As a result, the company saw an 85% decrease in processing time.
The procure-to-pay cycle also vastly improved. Previously, the paper-based process had numerous holes, where purchase orders were often created without the proper approvals, leaving managers to uncover expenditures in their end-of-the-month reports, long after the money had been spent. Now managers are automatically part of the approval workflow and have access to dashboards that provide real-time data for expenditures. The company also tapped Oracle Intelligent Document Recognition to automate input of invoices.
Going forward, Lexington Medical Center is looking to take its HR functions to the cloud. Tan says that he anticipates that AI will have the most immediate impact, particularly for the health system’s recruiters.
Partners
Tan was looking for a partner who would own the process, not point fingers when the inevitable setbacks arose, so he opted to partner with Oracle Consulting. Oracle Consulting’s insight into converting data from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud ERP was invaluable.
About the customer
Lexington Medical Center is a 607-bed hospital in West Columbia, South Carolina. It anchors a network of six community medical centers and an extended care center. It employs more than 8,900 healthcare professionals.