Healthy ERP
Strategies
Hill-Rom’s Kim Dennis and David
Rogers saw opportunities in
a new market segment—
but knew they’d need a
different approach to IT
to meet the challenge.
BY DAVID A. KELLY
HILL-ROM ACHIEVES BUSINESS AGILITY WITH A STRATEGIC ATTITUDE
TOWARD ITS ERP IMPLEMENTATION.
he complexity of large-scale enterprise resource plan-
ning (ERP) implementations is enough to daunt even
the most agile and innovative company. It’s not uncom-
mon for companies to discover, during the course of
a major IT project, that they need to refocus their attention
and strategic vision on new opportunities for growth and
that the IT systems that are effectively supporting much of
the organization will need to be changed to accommodate
new directions.
RICK ZAIDAN
That was the challenge facing Hill-Rom, the medical technology subsidiary of Hillenbrand Industries and the world’s
leading manufacturer of hospital beds. As a US$1.3 billion
medical device manufacturer with more than 6,000 associates all over the world, Hill-Rom found that its business processes and IT solutions were geared toward its largest lines of
business, while smaller but potentially higher-growth areas
were in need of different types of IT support. With Oracle’s
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP software as the foundation,
plus expert help from industry implementation partner CSS
International, Hill-Rom met the challenge of a new and different business segment.
PINPOINTING THE RIGHT PROCESSES
“Our rental business was growing, but we were limited by
a lack of system tools and in need of more-efficient processes,” says Kim Dennis, senior vice president, Post Acute
Care, at Batesville, Indiana–based Hill-Rom. “We knew there
were real opportunities in the third-party billing section of
our business. Our challenge was to make the system and
business process changes that we needed so we could scale
