Healthy ERP Strategies

Continued

Extending Your Reach

Extending your market, as Hill-Rom has achieved with its rental business, often requires an organization to stretch. But stretching requires flexibility and an innovative approach to an organization's IT systems.

To extend its reach more effectively into new markets, Hill-Rom embarked on an initiative with CSS International, to help clearly identify the business processes and systems needed in order for Hill-Rom to be as customer-centric as possible. The result was an array of improvements and enhancements involving the classic triad of people, process, and technology.

"We embarked on a 10-month process starting in August 2006 costing [US]$4.5 million," says David Rogers, senior project manager, Hill-Rom. "In addition, we fast-tracked specific sections to get new functionality out to our users as quickly as possible."

The goal of the project was very specific. It centered on improving efficiency and first-pass yield and enhancing Hill-Rom's capability to be responsive to the new and growing needs in the marketplace—basically enabling it to be more flexible to new payers, new processes, new products, new ways of compensating sales associates, and other business opportunities that would allow the company to maximize its reach within the healthcare industry. And it was obvious to Hill-Rom executives that building a more-agile and responsive system like Hill-Rom's was a critical success factor for the company.

It was also apparent that, with the complexity and dynamic nature of the industry, multiple ways of going to market were required. Those different channels required flexible systems.

But even when you have the right technologies, creating more-agile business processes is not necessarily a simple project. As with any mission-critical project, a significant portion of the success or failure of Hill-Rom's project rested on the specifics of the implementation and how users would respond to the business process changes.

"It was a very aggressive project. We spent the first third of the project basically re-engineering and enhancing the business processes; the middle third developing and testing; and in the final stretch, we had five go-lives in about four months," says Jim Miller, vice president of solutions, CSS International. "With two business divisions that had grown, and divisions they had acquired, Hill-Rom wanted to streamline, standardize, and add rigorous discipline to their business processes as well as enhance customer interactions. As importantly, they drove to remove redundancy, unneeded complexity, and waste."

High-Value Results

The completed project was delivered in June 2007 and it has greatly exceeded expectations. Hill-Rom reports that the business impact has been impressive.

"We've been able to recover revenue dollars and almost eliminate losses related to timely filing requirements, as well as improve efficiency from a staffing perspective by about 20 percent—all while improving the 'first-pass quality' of our transactions," says Hill-Rom's Dennis. "This efficiency means that my capability to add new products into the pipeline has been enhanced. When our cost per claim decreases, there are new and different products that I can now add to the portfolio, because the financial feasibility is improved."

But the results for the users have also had a big impact. For example, users previously had to go through multiple steps and re-enter data multiple times, which slowed down their ability to process orders and also required additional steps to verify the accuracy of each transaction.

"Previously, our users had numerous screens required to enter a credit, and at the end they wouldn't even be able to see what the dollar value of the transaction was until an overnight audit report was run," says Hill-Rom's Rogers. "Now we've greatly reduced the number of screens and have allowed the system to double-check all the entries to make sure the billing is exactly correct at the time of transaction entry, rather than the following day. It's a much more efficient process."

The result is an improved productivity gain, a potential realignment of skill required for certain tasks, and a much more satisfied and engaged group of users.