As the largest diversified post-acute healthcare provider in the U.S., Kindred at Home provides home care services to more than 350,000 patients from more than 600 community locations in 40 states.
Workday products: Enterprise Planning
Using Workday Adaptive Planning, we've seen an ROI of close to $350,000 annually over a three-year period for over $1 million in savings.
National healthcare provider experiences a 751% ROI in less than two months.
As one of the largest home care providers in the U.S., Kindred at Home had built up a complex budget planning and reporting process thanks to numerous acquisitions and hundreds of locations spread throughout the country. The healthcare provider faced a dire diagnosis: its budget managers were the same nurses responsible for providing care. "Most of our locations are led by nurses. Their favourite subject in school was not finance, so they're already not real crazy about the budgeting process," says Aimee McCorkle, vice president, Business Operations. In addition, constant changes to Medicare reimbursements and regular organisational hierarchy restructuring due to acquisitions, consolidations and new locations were difficult to manage in Microsoft Excel or the previous on-premises planning software.
The prescription? Workday Adaptive Planning. With Workday Adaptive Planning, the Kindred at Home finance team was able to simplify the process for the nurse budget managers, which in turn improved company visibility into the budget and increased its flexibility, not to mention freeing up nurse time to deliver better care. "Workday Adaptive Planning has allowed us to decrease our budget planning process time from approximately five months down to three months," says McCorkle. "With that shortened time, the finance team has more time to spend with operations and sales to help drive our business initiatives. We can actually do more return on investment planning or modelling on start-ups. We even get involved with acquisitions, when before we were spending half the year on the budget planning process."
Challenges
Results
With Workday Adaptive Planning OfficeConnect, data updates are automatic. That means board book presentations can be prepared in a matter of hours, as opposed to the week it took previously.
Challenge
Like many organisations that are built through acquisitions, Kindred at Home had several tools being used for budget planning and reporting. It had 400 locations across the country, and the process of budgeting was a long and arduous one. End users were frustrated with the length of time it took to complete their budgets, rollups had a variety of rules that had to be incorporated and that added to the complexity and there was a high level of dissatisfaction overall with the entire process.
Strategy
Kindred at Home began its due diligence in 2012 and evaluated a number of solutions, including Workday Adaptive Planning and Oracle. One of its acquisitions had been using Workday Adaptive Planning, and the success of that implementation helped drive the decision. The company ultimately selected Workday Adaptive Planning for a number of reasons, including:
Kindred at Home began its implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning in 2012, and began its phased-in deployment with its Home Health division. The deployment took only three months, and was very successful. Over the next year, the other divisions came on board in quick succession. This upcoming budget year will be the first with the entire company using Workday Adaptive Planning for its budgeting process, and it is already proving successful. Everyone in the organisation is now using Workday Adaptive Planning for budget planning – providing a holistic view of the entire organisation that was never available before. Users are reporting significant time savings, and the process has reduced workloads by more than two months for the finance team.
Key benefit areas.
Deploying Workday Adaptive Planning has enabled Kindred at Home to improve visibility, increase engagement of its budget managers and reduce the complexity of its budget process.
Key benefits of the project include:
Best practices.
As one of Kindred at Home's divisions already had Workday Adaptive Planning implemented, the finance team was able to leverage those previous experiences. As Workday Adaptive Planning was to be the corporate standard for all of Kindred at Home, the finance team developed a full project plan, and ensured the CFO had all the information and was behind the initiative. The team also developed a layout of the model and the calculations they wanted to see, to make sure the implementation team was up to speed at the beginning.
Another best practice recommended by the team is to ensure the definition of an organisational structure in the beginning. This is critical to the success of a planning and budget model, and while it is easy to do at the start, it does present challenges when trying to implement those levels of changes while the budget process is in motion. It is also important to define naming conventions and metrics early on, so that there is consensus and consistency throughout.
Calculating the ROI.
Nucleus quantified the initial and ongoing costs of software license subscription fees, personnel time to implement and support the application, employee training time and consulting over a 3-year period to calculate Kindred at Home's total investment in Workday Adaptive Planning.
Direct benefits quantified included the elimination of Oracle Hyperion license fees, consulting costs and reallocation of staff to other projects. Indirect benefits quantified included increased productivity in the finance team, IT and among the budget managers, driven by the elimination of the previous solution and the deployment of Workday Adaptive Planning, and were calculated based on the average annual fully loaded cost of the employees.
Not quantified were the additional efficiencies and savings Kindred at Home will gain from Workday Adaptive Planning as it expands its use of the application.