Success Stories - Saint Elizabeth Health Care
The Organization
Distinguished by their innovative approaches, Saint Elizabeth Health Care is a Canadian not-for-profit charitable organization founded in 1908. For nearly a century, they have anticipated and adapted to the health needs of their clients and communities, pioneering new programs and reaching out to those in need. Today, SEHC are leading the evolution of health care by combining the caring values and wisdom of their tradition with the unlimited opportunities of the knowledge and information age. SEHC has a talent team of more than 3,700 multidisciplinary staff, performs three million visits annually through its nineteen locations servicing more than half of the Community Care Access Centres in Ontario. They are fully accredited by the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation, and has knowledge and consulting initiatives across Canada and abroad
Saint Elizabeth Health Care’s mission is:
To share its talent and wisdom to serve the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of individuals and families in their homes and communities. Inspired by their historic roots and traditional respect for human dignity, they strive to care with professional excellence and compassion.
SEHC is proud to offer the most comprehensive programs in a variety of fields. The focus of their services extends beyond the immediate health issue to include broader objectives of promoting client independence, well-being and quality of life.
Home care clients can access their services in their home, workplace, school or location of choice, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With 25 Service Delivery Centres across Ontario, SEHC provides direct care and service on behalf of the publicly-funded Community Care Access Centres, as well as in select hospitals, long-term care facilities and community health care clinics.
As a recognized leader in home and community care, Saint Elizabeth Health Care shares its knowledge and wisdom nationally and internationally to support health organizations and the people they serve.
They offer customized consulting services in the following areas:
- Program management (including needs assessment, program development, implementation and evaluation)
- Operations management
- Human resources management
- Quality management (including program and performance measurement design and accreditation preparation)
- Knowledge development, education and e-learning
- Health policy development
- Transformative change management
SEHC also provides a Driver’s Assessment and Training Services program and offers educational services for their clients.
The Challenge
SEHC had been quickly outgrowing their current system, and required additional features and functionality in their new financial system to meet their future needs. SEHC was using several un-integrated systems with many manual processes to run different parts of their organization. Information was not only being handled manually, but at times being re-keyed into multiple systems. The financial statements were created manually in Excel, and were not able to be produced for several weeks after month end. The key problems were:
- Operational systems (or manual processes) not integrated to financials.
- Financial reporting capabilities were limited, and cumbersome to produce.
- Existing systems did not allow for easy access to information.
- Fixed Assets were tracked in Excel, and manually updated.
- Their current system did not offer any solution to be able to centralize and control the purchases of the organization.
- The capabilities of the existing financial system were at its capacity and no longer meeting SEHC’s needs.
Why Microsoft Dynamics GP
BDO Dunwoody was selected to implement the new system based on its extensive experience in Project Management and operational change along with strong skills with finance and operational systems. BDO was also selected for their expertise and experience in implementing the Microsoft Dynamics GP solution in other healthcare organizations. We suggested Microsoft Dynamics GP to address SEHC’s requirements for the following reasons:
Product Strength for Financial Requirements and Integrate to operational systems:
- Microsoft Dynamics GP provided the financial reporting flexibility that the SEHC needed to report the monthly financials and produce the information in the format requested by the Service Delivery Centres.
- The ability to produce financial statements in a timely manor and the ability to drill back to source transactional information was important for SEHC to be able to validate information with ease.
- A fully integrated financial system is a key requirement for SEHC as well as the ability to create integrations with external systems in order to eliminate having to manually re-enter information.
Ease of use:
- With a standard Windows interface, Dynamics GP is an easy financial system to learn. Users are able to easily leverage their existing skills with Microsoft products (Excel, Word, etc.) because Dynamics GP uses similar navigation.
- With an easy to use financial reporting tool, SEHC’s accounting team were able to create their own financial statements with ease. This included the ability create several reports that were not possible with their previous system.
- As the staff at SEHC changes, new users are able to learn the system easily. This will minimize the learning curve and increase new hire productivity.
Vendor Stability
- SEHC has a unique technical environment as all of their servers are hosted off-site. It is critical that they operate technology that is widely recognized and supported. This increases there ability to obtain remote support from skilled professionals.
- Microsoft Dynamics GP runs on the proven industry standard database, Microsoft SQL and is currently in Release 9.0. This is a mature product with a proven track record for stability in the market.
- By using proven technology SEHC will be able to maximize the return on their investment and continue to build on their existing Microsoft technology.
The Solution and the Technology
The new system designed and implemented by BDO, consists of the following Microsoft Dynamics GP Modules for Release 9.0 delivered on Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows and Citrix Technology.
| Operations |
Financials |
Reporting & Tools |
| Integration Manager |
General Ledger |
FRx Reporter |
| Purchase Order Processing |
Multicurrency Management |
FRx WebPort |
| |
Bank Reconciliation |
Extender |
| |
Electronic Bank Reconcile |
SmartList |
| |
Payables Management |
SmartList Builder |
| |
EFT for PM |
|
| |
Fixed Asset Management |
|
| |
Receivables Management |
|
The Results:
- The month end is now completed shortly after the calendar month.
- Financials are produced much earlier than before and distributed with ease through FRx WebPort.
- Integrations built from Procura and ADP have eliminated the need for manual and duplicate entries.
- The elimination of duplicate entry and manual tracking has improved productivity and job satisfaction in the accounting department.
- The elimination of duplicate entries has also significantly improved data integrity, accuracy and timelines.
- SDCs requesting information on transactions are responded to much more quickly.
- Routine journal entries are handled through Quick Journals or recurring entries which speeds up data entry processes significantly.
- The implementation of the fully integrated Fixed Assets module has eliminated the need for manual tracking and entry of fixed asset related entries. This has also led to significant time savings and improved accuracy in this area.
- The Purchase Order Processing module has allowed for SEHC to build new controls and processes to begin centralizing purchases in order to move towards large cost savings.
