The client

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center, a pediatric healthcare provider based in Omaha, Nebraska, offers primary, specialty and emergency care, as well as medical education and comprehensive research services. With 4,000 employees and locations across Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa, it is the only full-service pediatric specialty health care center in Nebraska and serves close to 150,000 patients a year.

The business challenge

In 2019, Children’s went live with phase 1 of their Oracle ERP, SCM and HCM journey. Phase 1, supported by a different implementation partner, fell short of expectations. This initial phase would not be categorized as a success – it was over on timeline, over on budget and under delivered on expectations. At nearly the same time, Jerry Vuchak joined the organization as the Chief Information Officer and began his assessment of the implementation and his strategy for the next phase. He quickly understood that there was work to do to make things right.

The Children’s team, along with Oracle resources, worked throughout the year to ‘stabilize’ their phase 1. Through this process, Jerry realized he needed a much different implementation consulting partner for phase 2. A partner that would think holistically, strategically, drive for unification and harmonization of processes, manage change and ensure success. Upon Oracle’s introduction, Jerry and Baker Tilly began conversations to calibrate and align on Children’s next steps, devising an appropriate road map and preparing a strong foundation for phase 2. This phase would be a strategic, transformative experience that would optimize and enhance the existing core elements of the Oracle Cloud platform while also driving innovative change. 

Strategy and solution

Through several months of calibration and planning, a road map was agreed upon to address “optimization” and “implementation.”

Optimization:

• Benefits Life Events needed to be evaluated and realigned to meet requirements
• Address consignment and inventory issues
• Review and improve procure-to-pay processes
• Implement functionality around service and blanket purchase orders
• Perform ABC Classification, Movement Analysis and Cycle Counting

Implementation:

• Talent Management
• Talent Acquisition
• Compensation

Even the best laid plans can have hiccups, and just as the project began, the COVID global pandemic struck. In March of 2020, the joint project team flawlessly pivoted to a completely virtual project. Ensuring unification, standardization and transformation, Baker Tilly began the project with a three-month “Harmonize phase.” This phase defines agreed upon design principles, future state processes that align to the organizational strategy and engages multiple stakeholder groups for input, design collaboration, education and buy-in. Additionally, this Harmonize phase included an assessment of the current Oracle platform in order to audit, prioritize and execute on the enhancement and optimization of the platform to increase adoption and overall satisfaction, particularly in ERP and supply chain.

Once crucial processes were unified and designed, a system prototype that incorporated leading practice recommendations was configured - the project progressed through design, test and deployment, culminating in an impeccable September 2020 go live of Oracle Recruiting, Talent Management and Workforce Compensation.

Optimization efforts continued with process redesign, configuration fixes and enhancements rolling out in subsequent quick-win waves in Benefits, followed by Reporting, Procure to Pay, Inventory and ABC Classification and Movement Analysis.

As a part of Jerry’s assessment of the earlier implementation, the CIO knew the team would require extra training and support to properly learn to use the “new muscles” required to govern and sustain themselves. With that in mind, Children’s engaged Baker Tilly in a “platinum level” which includes six months of extended knowledge transfer, coaching and general support.

Being a healthcare organization, Children’s was certainly not immune to the disruptions caused by COVID. However, ultimately, two of the CIO’s key objectives were met: there was no delay on the go live date and the project was within budget! Throughout this transformative initiative, which included a principled approach driving for unification and standardization, Children’s has automated literally hundreds of manual processes across finance, supply chain and HR. For example:

• In HR, the candidate experience has propelled Children’s from a regional recruiter to a national player in the healthcare labor market, just ahead of their $450 million dollar expansion that will demand even more high quality healthcare professionals.
• In finance, Children’s re-evaluated their service purchasing process and implemented new, more streamlined processes that aligned to the Oracle Cloud capabilities and leveraged standardized, delivered configurations and setup to better track and manage budgets on services.
• In supply chain, Children’s is now able to effectively and efficiently understand the value of inventory items relative to their importance to the hospital and confirm inventory counts to prevent loss and spoilage.

Children’s and their CIO are now enthusiastic members of the Oracle Cloud community and are frequent speakers and contributors at conferences and users groups. Their overall strategy is to continue to grow on the Oracle Cloud platform where it makes sense - refining integrations, growing more advanced with analytics and expanding the sophistication of audit capabilities.

We at Baker Tilly are honored to have earned Children’s trust, and are excited to be working alongside them as we progress together on their journey of success in the Oracle Cloud!

Why Baker Tilly

Children’s recognized the need to streamline and standardize their HR and ERP business processes to better align with leading practices, and to drive effectiveness and efficiency from their investment in Oracle Cloud. Ongoing education and training for successful sustainment was a propriety and fit well with Baker Tilly’s managed services offerings. Style-wise, Children’s desired a highly collaborative and strategic partner with experience in business process transformation and a proven track record in the healthcare industry. Baker Tilly’s ability to provide value beyond the software through a methodology that focused not only on the technology, but also on harmonizing and optimizing critical business operations was critical to Children’s current success.