Extending your market, as Hill-Rom has achieved with its
rental business, often requires an organization to stretch. But
stretching requires flexibility and an innovative approach to
an organization’s IT systems.
To extend its reach more effectively into new markets,
Hill-Rom embarked on an initiative with CSS International,
to help clearly identify the business processes and systems
needed in order for Hill-Rom to be as customer-centric
as possible. The result was an array of improvements and
enhancements involving the classic triad
of people, process, and technology.
“We embarked on a 10-month process
starting in August 2006 costing [US]$4.5
million,” says David Rogers, senior project
manager, Hill-Rom. “In addition, we
fast-tracked specific sections to get new
functionality out to our users as quickly
as possible.”
The goal of the project was very specific. It centered on improving efficiency
and first-pass yield and enhancing Hill-Rom’s capability to be responsive to the
new and growing needs in the marketplace—basically enabling it to be more
flexible to new payers, new processes,
new products, new ways of compensating sales associates, and other business
opportunities that would allow the
company to maximize its reach within the
healthcare industry. And it was obvious to Hill-Rom executives
that building a more-agile and responsive system like Hill-Rom’s was a critical success factor for the company.
It was also apparent that, with the complexity and dynamic
nature of the industry, multiple ways of going to market were
required. Those different channels required flexible systems.
But even when you have the right technologies, creating more-agile business processes is not necessarily a simple
project. As with any mission-critical project, a significant
portion of the success or failure of Hill-Rom’s project rested
on the specifics of the implementation and how users would
respond to the business process changes.
“It was a very aggressive project. We spent the first third
of the project basically re-engineering and enhancing the
business processes; the middle third developing and testing;
and in the final stretch, we had five go-lives in about four
months,” says Jim Miller, vice president of solutions, CSS
International. “With two business divisions that had grown,
and divisions they had acquired, Hill-Rom wanted to streamline, standardize, and add rigorous discipline to their business processes as well as enhance customer interactions. As
importantly, they drove to remove redundancy, unneeded
complexity, and waste.”
HIGH-VALUE RESULTS
The completed project was delivered in June 2007 and it has
greatly exceeded expectations. Hill-Rom reports that the business impact has been impressive.
“We’ve been able to recover revenue dollars and almost
eliminate losses related to timely filing requirements, as well
as improve efficiency from a staffing perspective by about 20
percent—all while improving the ‘first-pass quality’ of our
transactions,” says Hill-Rom’s Dennis. “This efficiency means
that my capability to add new products into the pipeline has
been enhanced. When our cost per claim
decreases, there are new and different
products that I can now add to the
portfolio, because the financial feasibility
is improved.”
But the results for the users have also
had a big impact. For example, users pre-
viously had to go through multiple steps
and re-enter data multiple times, which
slowed down their ability to process
orders and also required additional steps
to verify the accuracy of each transaction.
“Previously, our users had numerous
screens required to enter a credit, and at
the end they wouldn’t even be able to see
what the dollar value of the transaction
was until an overnight audit report was
run,” says Hill-Rom’s Rogers. “Now we’ve
greatly reduced the number of screens
and have allowed the system to double-
check all the entries to make sure the billing is exactly correct
at the time of transaction entry, rather than the following day.
It’s a much more efficient process.”
The result is an improved productivity gain, a potential
realignment of skill required for certain tasks, and a much
more satisfied and engaged group of users.
>>SNAPSHOTS
Hill-Rom
www.hill-rom.com
Employees: More than 6,000
Revenue: US$1.3 billion
Oracle products: Oracle’s JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne, including
Financials, Manufacturing, Distribu-
tion, and Advanced Pricing; Oracle
Database, Oracle Reports, Oracle
Forms, Oracle Application Server
Oracle User Productivity Kit
Consulting services from:
CSS International
www.cssus.com
McBee Associates
www.mcbeeassociates.com
PRODUCTIVITY IN ACTION
“Hill-Rom’s productivity gains were tremendous—the
improvements in productivity, associate training, third-party
filing, denial management, customer service—they’re really
ready to take on the world,” says CSS’s Miller. “They’re positioned not only to do better with their existing business but
also do better with any related businesses they may grow
into organically or acquire. As Hill-Rom moves into additional medical and therapy devices for use in people’s homes,
they now have a very powerful infrastructure that can be leveraged to really help grow their business.”
Luckily, the business has already benefited. At the start
of the project, the team had estimated a return on investment (ROI) of 40 percent, with about US$1.8 million in
annual benefits. However, the reality after implementation
has been much different.
