Success Stories

Business Challenge

Providence Care is like most healthcare organizations – setting business objectives and goals while maintaining the best level of patient care. The challenge lies in balancing the needs of the community with the needs of the business. Accountability and transparency are key – reporting to the Ministry of Health and the public, Providence had many business systems (SAP financial, Ormed HR, Omnicell dispensary, Onix budgeting) but needed a way to consolidate the data for reporting and budgeting purposes.

 

Reporting was a major challenge for Providence. Their reports offered only high-level information, and managers lacked the ability to drill down within accounts on actual costs. Seeing only these basic numbers meant they had no way of understanding the cause behind performance. Creating and distributing reports meant involving IT and then hand delivering them throughout the facility.

 

With the hospital moving to a new facility in 2017, the Finance team needed to prepare two fiscal years’ budgets at once. To complicate things further, the new facility would be operating on a different budget model so they needed a solution flexible enough to handle this.

 

Their budgeting system was “retiring” – no new development was planned, therefore the system would no longer be supported. Providence Care needed a solution that would meet their existing business requirements and was flexible enough to continue meeting their evolving needs and processes. 

 

Solution

Questica invests heavily in research and development (R&D) and the result is the highly scalable Questica Budget system that continues to evolve to meet the current and future needs of growing customers like Providence Care.

 

With 50 active users, Providence Care now has the tools in place to present a clear picture of their budget measured against their business objectives. Questica Budget provides Providence Care with the reporting functionality required immediately and with the tools necessary to prepare and track a two-year active budget.

 

Business Benefits

Transparency

Internally, Questica Budget provides that critical link between financial data and supporting documentation so Finance and Clinical Managers can see and understand the details behind performance. Answers are now available to questions such as “Was overtime driving costs, or scheduled hours?” or “What drug expenses are up year-over-year?”

 

Purchase transaction data from SAP is now available in Questica Budget, along with supporting details. Supposition no longer plays a part when reviewing financial data.

 

Consolidated data for better analysis

Questica Budget provides a way to bring the data from all systems into one interface, and creates that critical link between financial data, the details, and the supporting documentation.

 

Customizable/scalable system

Questica Budget creates customized functionality to work with Providence Care’s unique data structure. With the Providence Care hospitals moving into a new facility in the coming year, Questica Budget enables them to provide two year budgets with unique budget models for each.

 

Reporting capabilities

Providence Care now has access to extensive reporting options. Reports can be scheduled to distribute to managers on a regular basis via email. Plus, Managers are able to input commentary directly into the reporting system to explain variances and detail actions to be taken to address any shortcomings.

 

Providence Care has been using four reports primarily:

• Published Positions Report
  • This report offers full visibility to actual costs at a transactional and employee payroll level. It provides budget amounts, hours and FTEs for scheduled and replacement staff planning, grouped in different ways, with multiple drill down capabilities, all the way to the position/employee detail. Grouping breakdowns and rollups can include organizational structure, position category, position type, earning category and types. Several data filtering options are available.
• Compensation Details Report
  • This report provides, by Costing Center, actual vs budget data with variance comparisons for each: current period hours, current period dollars, year-to-date hours and year-to-date dollars. Drill down can be done through position category to position type (full-time, part-time) to earning code breakdowns. This report has enabled both Clinical Managers and Senior Management to have immediate access to their financial performance, and enable key decisions to be made promptly. Costs and management time are now being applied to patient care, instead of overhead management.
• Comprehensive Cost Center Variance Report
  • This report provides budget vs actual and variance amounts for a specific selected month, with drill down to the GL Account/Object level. This report allows managers to enter variance explanations electronically, eliminating the need for paper reports.
• Department Summary Report
  • Two versions of this report exist. The “Financial” provides period to date and year to date actual, budget and variance amounts with drill down to the GL Account/Object level. The “payroll” version shows budgeted hours instead of dollars with the same options as the financial version.

 

Staff planning

Questica’s Staff Planning Module provides one centralized budgeting resource for Providence Care to manage their 1,600 positions, 1,000+ employees, and 86 staff plans. This tool allows them to input their unique staffing requirements and salary and premium information to forecast their anticipated staffing costs.

 

Support

The support teams and systems in place at Questica ensured timely responsiveness to any issues that arose during the implementation.

 

In selecting Questica Budget, Providence Care has partnered with a company with a long-established history in public sector budgeting. Questica is a company with the breadth and depth of experience to understand their current needs and to anticipate how these needs will change in the future.

 

Thanks to more efficient budgeting, Providence Care is brilliant.