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Top-ranked children's hospital improves reporting, accelerates grant process
Business Challenge
One of the oldest children’s hospitals in the U.S. — with more than 150 years of innovative service — was looking at ways to improve its reporting structure. The hospital gained much of its research funding through grants and found that the management tasks associated with the use of the grant funds – such as reporting time spent, use of funds, and research results – were time consuming, manual processes that often led to inaccurate reporting. Its Finance Research Division was using an ERP system that did not provide the required reporting ability to analyze grant funding for the research area. They had no means to easily analyze grants which made it difficult to determine whether they were within budget. In addition, grants were taking weeks to close.
CSI Solution
The Research Division turned to CSI because of our expertise in building data marts and implementing innovative business intelligence solutions with Business Objects.
During a six-week project, CSI architected a Financial Research data mart that included financial, materials management, payroll and HR information. To extract data from the existing ERP system, CSI also created sophisticated SQL scripts and stored procedures in Oracle. And finally, 70 Business Objects reports were created in the BI Enterprise Model. These reports provided users views into their data - previously unavailable - to improve and accelerate the grant process and track trends and understand their budgetary requirements.
Return on Investment
In the hospital’s previous environment, it was difficult to analyze grant funding, as well as identify possible vendor discounts in the supply chain. By taking all of the research center’s data and integrating it into a data warehouse, the organization gained tangible benefits in the ability to perform grant analysis, vendor analysis and determine where certain processes could be improved. The hospital was also able to close grants faster, equating to time and cost savings.
With the new data mart and business intelligence solution with users numbering more than 300, the hospital is experiencing substantial dollar savings.
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