A mid-size northeast regional healthcare system's journey to stabilize and enhance its Oracle ERP platform
Challenge: ERP stabilization and optimization
Following a mid-size regional healthcare provider’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, which included financial (FIN), supply chain management (SCM), and human capital management (HCM) functional areas, the organization faced post go-live challenges that limited their ability to achieve desired and expected business outcomes.
The top priority was addressing invoice match exception build-up in the procure-to-pay (P2P) area to prevent supply chain disruption. Additionally, leaders identified the need to align business processeswith Oracle functionality and enhance employee training to move beyond day-to-day troubleshooting and maximize the value of their ERP investment.
Approach: Improve functionality while minimizing disruption
Huron’s leading practice assessment approach was tailored to the healthcare provider’s unique business culture and requirements to build trust and expedite issue resolution.
The healthcare provider and Huron worked collaboratively to identify root causes, address high-priority operational issues, and expand Oracle functionality, while simultaneously minimizing disruption to current state operations. This iterative, scalable approach included:
Assessment and prioritization of key issues
To ensure that the project team focused on the highest priority operational issues while laying the foundation for future optimization, the organization’s procure-to-pay function was assessed across the following areas:
- Configuration and functional setup, including additional Oracle Cloud functionality that was available and not deployed
- Alignment with leading practice business processes
- Technical considerations such as master data/conversions, integration architecture, and environment usage
- Ongoing support requirements and end-user training needs
Huron’s project team leveraged key performance indicators and related system metrics to narrow their search and quantify issue size and priority. The analysis quickly uncovered a significant and increasing backlog of invoice match exceptions, and additional areas for process improvement and training. Addressing the backlog of match exceptions was critical to stabilizing day-to-day operations, with the remaining opportunities prioritized on a road map based on urgency and impact.
Roadmap development for stabilization of critical business functions
The holistic road map included two key parallel paths.
Resolving match exceptions and reconciling open purchase orders by:
- Troubleshooting persistent master data errors by comparing legacy data versus spend history.
- Reviewing data to better leverage the group purchasing organization (GPO).
- Eliminating duplications of items and ensuring item price alignment by analyzing blanket purchase agreements.
- Mass-resolving of match exceptions utilizing existing system functionality — including file-based data imports and representational sate transfer (REST) API’s.
Building a prioritized road map of improvement opportunities and actionable work plans for:
- Optimizing ERP dashboards and vendor reports for superior functionality.
- Improving negotiation processes with suppliers by enhancing contract management functionality.
- Reducing issue recurrence by deploying appropriate master data governance.
Optimization execution and expansion of end-user training
A critical part of stabilizing the organization’s ERP was ensuring that end users were able to resolve issues, mitigate future risks, and build organizational confidence independently following optimization work.
As part of the system optimization effort, Huron also conducted enhanced end-user training focused on match exception resolution, dashboards, alignment of procurementactivity, and financial report reconciliation.