Case Study: Mayne Health – web based daily reporting study

Case Study: Mayne Health - PDF Version 550 Kb

Tangible Benefits

As one of the leading providers of health care services in Australia, Mayne Health have more than 1500 different departments contributing to their reporting and business intelligence process. SPF Plus powered by TM1 has changed the way they operate, providing them with huge cost and time savings, along with substantial increases in data accuracy and reporting flexibility.

According to Sreenivas Tata, Mayne Health’s Management Information Analyst, “We now have significant efficiencies because we don’t have to send out thousands of spreadsheets via email, receive them, fix them when users feel artistic, and then process the data back to TM1.” He goes on “Previously, we could not capture our data in a timely manner and the users had no ownership of their data.”

“Now each individual user Australia-wide enters their data directly into our SPF Plus Web Interface. Users cannot edit or break the input templates, emails don’t get “lost” and we don’t miss spreadsheets during the process. Users can also see the consolidated results of their data input immediately. We don’t have to reproduce any calculations in worksheets anymore, because it’s all done in our SPF Plus application from the word go.”

Whenever Mayne require any changes to input templates and reports, these are done centrally and then require no further report distribution as users access the templates directly via the web.

“We are now able to capture more data, more accurately, more often with more detail giving us much better insight into the business. We feel this puts us way ahead of the game, and we can’t imagine how we ever operated without SPF Plus”.

Profile

Mayne Group Limited is Australia’s leading provider of private health care services. They also develop and manufacture generic pharmaceuticals for world markets and produce a number of Australia’s market-leading consumer health products.

Industry

Health care and pharmaceutical products

Business Intelligence Requirements

• Seamless integration with SAP, Excel and Internet Explorer
• Efficient and timely collection and delivery of key metrics and daily statistics via the web for more than 1500 departments
• A web “portal” capability where each user has their own profile thus providing individualised reports and input templates without any extra administration
• Zero install on client machines – only requirement being Internet explorer

Previous System

Excel-based templates with weekly updates into TM1

Solution

SPF Plus powered by TM1 OLAP server

Benefits

• Bottom up planning for 1500 departments
• Top down revisions and changes to plans reflected immediately
• Major cost savings
• Large improvements in analysis to assist business decisions
• Low IT support
• Freed up 2 FTE’s in Corporate
• Automated distribution of P&L and Operational Reports to all department managers

Business Scenario

With operational responsibility for more than 50 different hospitals around Australia, Mayne Health relies on many different departments to supply data for their business reporting requirements, and as often happens in large companies, a number of different systems are used across these departments. Therefore, Mayne needed a simple but thorough method to collect and consolidate daily, weekly and monthly information from all of their hospitals. They were reliant on emailing Excel spreadsheets to users, who would then enter their data, and send the sheets back to HQ by email. The sheets were then opened and the data was processed, with any errors having to be cross-checked back with the relevant department and then corrected. This process alone required two FTE’s.

“Other problems that we were experiencing”, continues Tata, “were that the users thought they knew how the spreadsheets should look, so they would change them all the time. We had to spend too much time educating users and fixing these sheets.”

“We then also spent a lot of time maintaining the sheets, updating them and resending them each time we needed new data input. This then created gigabytes of spreadsheets stored on machines throughout the company, which ultimately became completely unmanageable.”

At this point, Mayne knew they could, and should, be carrying out this process in a more efficient and cost effective way. Sreenivas went on to say “We knew a web-based solution would work better. We wanted users to be able to log into a portal where their user profile would offer them the reports and input templates which were relevant only to their specific job functions. We didn’t want them to be able to change the input templates or reports either. SPF Plus offered this functionality, where the data input into the templates by the end users is collected centrally without any manual intervention. And it is all done in real-time.”

“Ultimately, before we implemented SPF Plus as a solution, we realized that overall, we spent more time and money processing and maintaining the spreadsheets than we did reporting on and analysing the data. This didn’t make any sense from a business intelligence stance.”

Other Requirements Included:

• A system that would seamlessly integrate various corporate analyses and reporting functions
• Improvements in Planning Process– real time planning to be available for 1500 departments Australia-wide
• An efficient reporting system for use by all levels of management and staff
• Scalable to a large number of concurrent users
• Ability to extend the application for other uses such as Balance Scorecarding etc.
• Simple maintenance with comprehensive security

Business Solution:

Mayne Health carried out a structured and comprehensive evaluation process in order to determine which product’s capabilities best suited their Business Intelligence requirements.

SPF Plus was the standout product because of its seamless integration with their other systems and its ability to publish existing Excel based reports to the web. Scalability was also critical with so many users nationally all entering data or reviewing reports during a very narrow time slot each morning. SPF Plus also required no installation on client machines which was a massive bonus with so many end users, and it provided a rich feature set, including Workflow, notification, cube browsing etc.

“The implementation process itself presented a number of challenges, but in each instance, the SPF Plus team stepped up and remedied all our issues in a timely manner” said Tata. He continues “We rolled out the new reporting and planning application in stages, 200 – 300 users at a time to check that speed and scalability were not going to be issues, and that all users were happy and working properly. As with any new system, there was some getting used to it for the end users, but generally they grasped it fairly quickly and were able to enter their data much more efficiently, allowing them to get back to their real jobs: that of caring for patients. Now users are very comfortable with SPF Plus. There are users entering data or reviewing reports 24/7!” SPF Pty Ltd