Stephen Francis

Stephen has more than 35 years of experience guiding organizations through financial and business transformation across a variety of industries, including higher education, healthcare, and commercial.

My passion is serial business and finance transformation enabled by technology and process redesign. The ability to leverage cloud-based software-as-a-service systems puts the technology ownership in the hands of the process owner.”

About Stephen

Stephen delivers process transformation that meets clients’ needs through a combination of relationship skills, functional experience, and technical knowledge. Stephen’s strengths are in managing client and internal customer relationships, along with leadership experience in developing cross-functional business transformation and delivery plans.

Stephen leverages his functional and technical expertise to facilitate client progress by positioning changes that provide organizations with the ability to strategically and technically meet their goals and objectives. His leadership, abilities, and approaches have helped the organizations that he has worked with to achieve success through the commitments to and understanding of teams of people who are highly qualified, enthusiastic, and committed to excellence.

In recent engagements, Stephen has:

• Designed and managed a claim-on-cash transformation initiative for a private $5 billion academic medical center and university, resulting in increased transparency and accountability for departments and operating units relative to cash flow in a shared treasury environment.
• Led the full-platform solution design for a statewide agency of public universities and colleges consisting of 31 institutions and over 50 campuses, creating centralization and process consistency while increasing daily visibility by the state to funds flow and spending authority.
• Directed a chart-of-accounts consolidation and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution design for a $6 billion public medical university and statewide healthcare organization, improving the employee experience and financial controls across the entire enterprise.
• Led an initiative for financial transformation, process design, and system remediation at a private $7 billion university and healthcare organization, resulting in a reduced total cost of system ownership, increased finance and accounting productivity, and improved reporting quality and control.

Prior to joining Huron, Stephen served as specialist leader at Deloitte. He has also held leadership positions at organizations such as IBM, Appirio, W.J. Bradley Mortgage Capital, Prodigy Health Group, CQG, and Intuit. Early in his career, he worked for GE and is a graduate of their Financial Management Program. While at GE, he became Six Sigma trained and Champions certified.

Stephen holds a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and both an MBA and a Master of Science in accounting from Regis University in Denver, Colorado.