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Customers In The Spotlight

University of Louisville Hospital

"BusinessObjects has helped transform University of Louisville Hospital by making our department heads more accountable. With better and more timely information, directors can do a better job of being stewards of the money, their departments, and the patients they're treating."

Bob Bibelhauser
Budget Director
University of Louisville Hospital

Challenge

As a tertiary medical facility and the only trauma center serving western and central Kentucky, University of Louisville Hospital offers a broad range of specialties—everything from stroke management and high-risk obstetrics to neurosurgery, cancer care, and advanced diagnostic imaging. As a result, the hospital has numerous departments, each with its own budget.

Approximately 50 directors are in charge of various departments at University of Louisville Hospital, many of them in nursing—critical care, emergency services, rehabilitation, physical and occupational therapy, and more. Other directors manage overhead functions such as accounting, purchasing, and the business office.

Getting timely, relevant flexed budget information into the hands of department heads was a problem. The hospital's underlying Lawson financial transaction system was used as the reporting engine. "The reporting capabilities of that system are extremely limited," says Bob Bibelhauser, budget director for University of Louisville Hospital. "With Lawson, we got a very long report that lists every account. Finding a particular item was like searching for a needle in a haystack."

Although the hospital used BusinessObjects™ Budgeting once a year to roll up the numbers, there didn't seem to be a good way to keep things on track during the intervening months. When Bibelhauser took over as budget director, things started to change.

Approach

The hospital began to take greater advantage of its powerful budgeting and reporting solution from Business Objects, an SAP company. Now, instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, 'we have the account information extracted and dumped into BusinessObjects,' says Bibelhauser.

BusinessObjects Budgeting contains a program that generates the statement of operations (SOP), or departmental income statement. "With BusinessObjects, I can immediately calculate my SOP," says Bibelhauser. "It also provides me with the ability to drill by department and account. For example, if salaries are over budget in the nursing area, I can keep drilling down to see exactly where the problem is."

"Each director is responsible for a budget," says Bibelhauser. "Before we started leveraging the reporting capabilities of BusinessObjects, directors had to go to the intranet and actively pull up reports from a big laundry list. Now the reports are sent straight to them via email."

The sequential distribution feature of the Business Objects software is also helpful. "I use it to email individual SOPs to the department directors," says Bibelhauser. "There is a place on the form where they can explain their budget variances and then send the explanations to their supervisor with a copy to me. On top of that, a summary report lists every department and their variances. And I just did a report that allowed me to pull up next year's budget, set out the goals for each director, and assign flexible variances based on individual department budgets."

Results

"The reporting capabilities built into BusinessObjects Budgeting are just fantastic," says Bibelhauser. "It's a very flexible tool that allows us to quickly model the behavior that we are trying to encourage."

According to Bibelhauser, the department directors love the information they're getting on a monthly basis. "We're trying to help them manage their budgets better," he says. "In the past, they were simply told they were over budget. Now that they're getting better data, it's easier to understand why they exceeded the target. We're analyzing our systems so we can answer the basic question: 'What do we need to change, in order to do a better job?'"

Department directors are not the only beneficiaries of the information that is generated through Business Objects reporting. "We use BusinessObjects for a lot more than just budgeting. The reporting tools are very fluid, easy to use, and flexible. They give us the ability to easily get data in the directors' hands, so they can manage their units more effectively," says Bibelhauser. "In addition to sending individual SOPs to the directors, I'm able to provide our executive management team a rollup of the performance of the departments that report directly to them through those directors. This insight is a critical component in many strategic decisions that affect the hospital."

A report that Bibelhauser prepared during the most recent annual budget cycle illustrates the point. "I compared five years' worth of budget information, including a projection for the coming year, all the way down to the financial statement line of each director," he says. "When we sat down with the CFO and the controller, they noticed that drug expenses were up significantly. Using the drill-down tool, it was very easy to pinpoint the account that was causing the variance. We could see that chemotherapy was up 20% in the oncology department. This gave us the ability to prepare a clear description of this and other variances, which the CFO used when he delivered the budget to the board."

Bibelhauser is impressed not only with the Business Objects software, but also with the support behind it. "I can send the technical support people a question, along with the report or template that I'm looking at, and they can tell me immediately how to solve my problem," he says. "But they don't just fix it. They help me understand what I need to do, so I can fix it myself the next time. As a result of that relationship, my knowledge and ability to use the system has grown exponentially. Business Objects customer support is focused, quick, and absolutely fantastic."

Another big plus is the fact that Business Objects software is easy to use. "You have to gain a basic understanding of the dimension tables, which are simple, and then it's just a matter of your own creativity in designing the reports and grabbing the information you want," says Bibelhauser. "The front-end reporting tool is Excel-based, and that's something that most finance people are already familiar with. Every accountant can get in here and do reports easily."

In the end, it's all about performance optimization. "BusinessObjects has helped transform University of Louisville Hospital by making our department directors more accountable," concludes Bibelhauser. "With better and more timely information, directors can do a better job of being stewards of the money, their departments, and the patients they're treating. My job is to help the directors understand the information they're getting. BusinessObjects makes it easy."

• Learn more about Business Objects Planning and Budgeting
• Read more Business Objects customer success stories

Quick Facts

• Industry
  Healthcare
• Business Process:
  Financial—budgeting, forecasting, reporting.
• Business Pain
  Limited reporting capabilities of the Lawson system made it difficult to track and manage departmental budget variances on a periodic basis.
• Why Business Objects?
  In addition to accurate and flexible budgeting, the Business Objects software gives directors the goal and variance information they need to manage their budgets more successfully.
• Business Objects Products and Services:
  BusinessObjects Budgeting