Business Transformation and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Transforming the business management of healthcare

The challenge

Healthcare organizations most often begin transformational journeys in response to a trigger or triggers that serve as a catalyst for significant change. Such journeys aim to enhance growth, efficiency, capital, and quality. Triggers for business transformation can include:

• The desire to create a competitive advantage
• A decline or gap in performance relative to peer organizations
• The lack of timely and credible information to manage the enterprise
• A new management team, CEO, or major changes in board membership
• The desire to fix dysfunctional, broken processes
• A reorganization, acquisition, and/or joint venture
• Poor customer or user experiences
• A recognition that the status quo is no longer sufficient
• A system upgrade, replacement, or the implementation of new clinical, financial, or administrative applications

The best approach to transforming your business is to adopt an enterprise method to long-term, sustainable improvement. At its core, business transformation is a key executive management initiative that aligns people, processes, and technologies across an organization to realize an overall strategy that focuses on financial management, supply chain, or human capital.

Our point of view

Cost reduction is often the initial or primary goal of business transformation, and healthcare organizations can successfully meet cost-cutting pressures through standardization, automation, and consolidation. But more strategic goals can both cut costs and attain new business strategies. These goals may include:

• Sustainability and quality: Sustain performance, measure quality, and address demands for transparency
• Innovation and growth: Evolve the business model, grow the enterprise, maintain the mission
• Operational improvement: Do more with less and improve quality
• Financial performance: Manage margins, maximize capital, and reinvest in the enterprise
• Health information technology: Maximize the value of clinical and administrative systems
• Governance, risk, and compliance: Use compliance as a competitive differentiator

We can help you

PwC has teamed with leading healthcare providers, academic medical centers, and payers to use technology to develop and sustain a competitive advantage in the marketplace and to support organizational missions. The PwC team has proven experience with all of the leading platforms in healthcare - Oracle / PeopleSoft, Oracle / eBusiness, Lawson, and SAP.

Transformation programs structured in this manner position an enterprise to create a competitive advantage (through processes), realize that advantage (through technology), and sustain the subsequent benefits long-term (through organizational change and adoption).