Laying the foundation for a successful healthcare Oracle Cloud implementation

Healthcare organizations do not simply decide one day to adopt Oracle ERP Cloud. A digital transformation involves a long, thoughtful process that requires careful planning and meticulous short- and long-term goal setting in collaboration with a team of professionals.

Baker Tilly’s Oracle Cloud practice leader Brad Fisher recently joined Stephen Salata, Baker Tilly’s Oracle delivery leader, at the Heathcare Industry User Group Interact 2022 conference for a comprehensive discussion about some of the most important insights for organizations to have a successful healthcare Oracle Cloud transformation.

Q: When creating a vision, how should organizations define success for an Oracle Cloud implementation?

Salata: We always challenge our clients or prospects to think about what objectives they want to get out of an implementation. What does success look like? Can we align implementation goals so that they also align with their strategic organizational initiatives? Let’s start with defining all of their current pain points, inefficiencies in their legacy systems and processes, and to translate those into objectives that can be measured unambiguously. Once we have that list, we can prioritize them in order of ROI and how well they match to enterprise-wide strategic initiatives.

Fisher: We want our customers to express what's most critical to them, alleviating which pain points will help the most, maybe it’s gaining the most automation, maybe it’s improving employee experience or minimizing attrition, but the leadership of the organization has to agree and buy in to these priorities and how to measure the KPIs. We can say “we think we know your KPIs,” but we need to collaborate with the organization to understand where their priorities are - and those success metrics laid out become the guiding principles of the project.

Q: How does Baker Tilly help organizations streamline their business processes a drive for workforce adoption?

Salata: "We've been doing these processes this way for a long time" is a common statement we hear, and the importance of these projects oftentimes is turning the page on that mindset. There's a reason why the organization is willing to invest in the application to be able to streamline processes, become more agile, etc. Change is difficult for humans but feeling a bit uncomfortable in the beginning is a good thing. This is where change management is critical to success.

Fisher: I think it's important because you do want to get away from the status quo. And if you can drive to enterprise-wide business processes, it's just going to make your life that much easier on the back end during the project and post go live when the organization has to sustain the cloud application and all the upgrades that come from the value of a SaaS platform. Baker Tilly is viewed in the Oracle Cloud ecosystem as a turnaround expert and is asked to help organizations that are either live but not satisfied with the outcomes, or in projects where they just cannot get live. What we see over and over is one of the biggest reasons for an unsuccessful project is due to a “lift and shift” mentality on the project. Keeping business processes the same as they were in the legacy systems and migrate them to the Oracle cloud. That is just flat out a bad strategy. It’s spending a lot of money and resources to go in a big circle. To use another analogy, its sort of like getting a new shiny luxury car after driving a bicycle everywhere but the new car has a governor on it where it can only go 15 mph. You paid a lot of money for this new shiny car but are still going as fast as the bicycle. Just not effective.

Salata: Comments we hear often are: “‘We have a really inefficient month-end close process’ or ‘our new hires have a horrible onboarding experience.’” We bring that information from our sales cycle to our implementation team, so we can spend more time breaking down the business processes and the steps required within it. Where can we automate steps in the process to reduce time and human error. Where can we leverage workflows and analytics to keep people aligned on where the process is, who is doing what and when so its auditable and can be viewed in real time? So, when you have your first month-end close in Oracle, you can say, ‘Hey, this was well worth it and I’m glad we called that out, because we cut our time for month-end close in half.’ Or We have reduced our time to onboard resources by 75% making them more productive and giving them a much better onboarding experience, which is going to lead to better retention of our hires.

Salata: Another interesting aspect of the project is that sometimes there are competing agendas inside the organization, where two departments are fighting over what's most important. And so sometimes this process of spending time up front in our Calibrate phase helps figure those things out, as we organize those competing objectives from a prioritization perspective from the client as well as where there may be dependencies. Once we gather all these data points, it’s clear the sequencing of items in a deployment and the client can see it and agree to it. This allows for less friction in the implementation phase as everyone knows what we are doing and why from a sequencing perspective.

Salata: In healthcare, the process is a little bit different because there are certain regulations and compliance aspects. We know that there are certain areas where we may not be able to change or manipulate as much, and that's one of the benefits of leveraging the Baker Tilly team that has such a strong healthcare background and SMRs on a Healthcare industry team that understands what areas we can change or standardize and what aspects have to remain the same due to compliance.

Q: How do we want to see data and analytics in the future?

Fisher: If we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that people now have seen the benefit of working from home. Working virtually is very difficult in 30-year-old on premise tools where VPNs must be installed. A huge benefit of a cloud based platform is it’s a URL based user interface on the web and you can easily view anything in real time on mobile devices anywhere at any time as long as you have an internet connection. People, especially senior management, and executives who work from home want analytics without having to VPN into something. They can just look on their iPhone or tablet and read their dashboards to make real time business decisions for today and tomorrow.

For more information on how Baker Tilly works with clients in the healthcare industry to ensure a successful cloud implementation using a proven phased approach, contact us today.