LUX MED Group
Case Study
The Group's dynamic growth resulted in the emergence of problems that required new organisational and technological solutions.
Solution category
The LUX MED Group is the leader on the market of private medical services in Poland. The Group comprises 173 own and company-owned facilities. The Group also cooperates with more than 1,600 outpatient clinics across Poland. The LUX MED Group offers comprehensive medical care - outpatient and diagnostic, with more than 1,600,000 patients under its care. The Group's services are used by corporate and individual customers who purchase packages or use single visits. The company also cooperates with insurance companies and the National Health Fund.
The Group's dynamic growth caused problems that required new organisational and technological solutions. The existing financial reporting system was based on MS Excel sheets, and the primary medium in the communication process was e-mail. A major challenge was the extremely complex structure of responsibility, difficulties in coordinating and controlling processes.
Challenge
The aim of the project was to create a uniform system used by the Planning and Controlling Department for handling budgeting processes and reporting budget realisation in the LUX MED Group, which, based on a central database, was to
- reduce the workload related to process organisation and coordination
- improve communication between information providers and process administrators,
- improve the quality and consistency of processes by maintaining uniform data dictionaries,
- reduce the risk of human errors (incorrect data, incorrect references).
One of the key innovations in the new budgeting process was to use historical indicators to determine medical costs. The values provided expertly by medical centre directors were abandoned in favour of budgeting based on the number of services and unit cost.
The purpose of this operation was to better link revenues and costs in the budgeting procedure. The use of this technique required moving from the number of patients served (the basic value determining the amount of revenue) to the number of services broken down by specialty and medical centre. The amount of calculations required was beyond the capacity of spreadsheets.
Solution
As a result of the analysis of vendors and solutions offered, LUX MED decided to cooperate with Cogit and implement the system based on the Infor platform.
The choice was supported by meeting most of the requirements, including availability of key functionalities not fully supported by other systems:
- flexibility of the proposed solution - extremely important with this complexity of business
and many exceptions in the budgeting and reporting model,
- the ability to switch between different reports or formats (e.g. the ability
the ability to switch between different reports or formats (e.g. the ability to go from anywhere in the P&L to a P&L format),
- a drill-down function allowing for viewing results from the P&L Total level through
brands, regions, MPK up to individual transactions - from the same application level,
- possibility of free modelling of the approval process within the budget model
and ease of tracking the progress of work on the budget.
The work related to the implementation of the Financial Controlling module was divided into two major sub-stages. The critical date for the success of the entire project was early September, when the next budget process was scheduled to begin. The budgeting system took a total of 9 weeks to build. During this time a solution covering the key needs of the Group was created. The LUX MED project team was actively involved in the project work. The employees of the Controlling Department took part in modelling the system dictionaries (e.g. MPK structure), creating and adjusting budget formats or defining user rights.
In the background of the main project, the integration of accounting systems, necessary after the merger of companies into the Group, was performed. A coherent accounting database forms the basis for target financial reports available through the system. Financial reports automatically refer to the budget previously created in the system.
Results
The implementation of the system allowed for effective implementation of all Controlling processes in the new structure of the LUX MED Group. All project goals have been achieved. The quality and timeliness of budgets and financial reports is satisfactory for all concerned.
Wdrożone rozwiązanie wniosło też nową jakość do comiesięcznego procesu raportowania finansowego.
Podstawę do określenia wyniku finansowego stanowią dane zgromadzone w systemie
księgowym. Prezentacja wyników właścicielowi poprzedzona jest jednak przeglądem danych realizowanym z dyrektorami poszczególnych ośrodków odpowiedzialności. Właściciele budżetów cząstkowych otrzymują szczegółowy rachunek wyników; dodatkowo dla każdej wartości na raporcie możliwe jest wyświetlenie pełnej listy zapisów księgowych składających się na daną pozycję.
Zgromadzenie wszystkich danych w scentralizowanym systemie ograniczyło nakład pracy związany z przygotowaniem niestandardowych raportów zamawianych w trybie pilnym przez zarząd i prowadzeniem analiz w trybie ad hoc. Obróbka danych za pomocą formuł, arkuszy powiązanych czy makr nie jest już konieczna – w jej miejsce wystarczyło zdefiniowanie odpowiedniego układ raportu, bądź zmiana parametrów już istniejącego.
