About Ecumen
Headquartered in Shoreview, Minnesota, Ecumen was known by the name “Lutheran foster care for refugees in Minnesota” at the time of its inception in 1862. It is a non-profit organization, offering a variety of senior housing options and services. These include cooperative senior housing, independent living, assisted living, long-term care, short term habilitation care, home care, and hospice. In addition to this, they specialize in providing senior housing development, clinical housing development, and senior housing management services.
The Challenges
Ecumen being a massive organization, had several financial processes which were siloed and hence they were unable to get a comprehensive picture of the organization’s financial activities. They wanted to compare the actual spending against the allocated budget, which was initially not possible as there was no link between their budgeting system and the ERP solution. In addition to this, they wanted to embark on their cloud journey and replace their on-premise ERP system to derive optimal value from the available data and deliver focused patient care.
The professionals were manually making entries into their financial system which consumed time and effort and increased the probabilities of errors. Ecumen was looking for a system that standardizes their chart of accounts and enterprise structure. Furthermore, they wanted the Medicaid and HUG reports to be generated directly from the system on the basis of the chart of account mapping and not from different ledgers. They also wanted to improvise their inventory management processes and closely monitor the quantities of the goods and equipment being utilized.
The Solution
We implemented Oracle Financial Cloud for Ecumen to unify their different financial management processes and get a clear view of their financial health. We created a consistent and centralized chart of accounting structure with an additional report generation facility. With Oracle Planning, the budgeting and forecasting entries were automated and stored in a centralized location. Using the Oracle Self Service Procurement Cloud, Ecumen was able to automate procurement approval and vendor management processes. The billing and clinical systems were integrated to address their administrative needs. Finally, sub-ledgers were created to address Ecumen’s requirement of generating HUD and Medicaid reports from a single system.
The Outcome
Ecumen was able to acutely monitor its procurement processes as the number of vendors was reduced from 15,000 to 3,000. Since the cheques were now electronically connected to the invoices in the Oracle Cloud applications, the number of check printed copies was lowered from 600/week to 350/week moving them forward towards becoming a sustainable organization while visualizing data from a single source. The increase in the influx of electronic invoices from 50% to 80% promoted visibility and transparency across the entire financial process.
Ecumen maintained better cash flow with Oracle Cloud solutions. The Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) reports gave C-suite professionals extensive insights into the real-time transactional data and enabled them to study the data patterns so that they can initiate informed actions. The integration of payroll data for EPM budgeting enabled them to synchronize budget and actual spending and prepare a detailed financial analysis of the same.
The automation of manual processes enabled them to give room to their staff to focus on other crucial initiatives. The mobile workforce was able to access the required data from their devices to deliver quick and superior care & improve resident satisfaction. Oracle Planning’s predictive capabilities and easy to understand dashboard enabled them to have an unparalleled insight into their forecasting and budgeting activities. With the latest technology solutions now driving their infrastructure, they were able to remodel their business processes and make them more compliant with global standards.