Few industries are as complex as healthcare. Projects may span multiple years, involve numerous partners and regulators, and require multiple teams working across several countries to complete, posing many significant challenges. We spoke to representatives of some healthcare companies to understand how they go about addressing them. Here’s an excerpt.
What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?
One of the biggest challenges that we face is the ability to capture and manage information effectively. We found ourselves trying to track costs and resources across numerous systems that weren’t integrated with each other. In many cases, data entry was manual and it was virtually impossible to understand what was really happening. That makes it difficult to track performance, and it exposes us to significant risk.
How do you go about addressing those problems?
We need to ensure that we track all our work, costs, and resources – employees, contractors and partners – in one place. Work is delivered and executed across multiple systems, and that’s OK, but there has to be a way to consolidate all of that information in one place. That’s the only way we can ensure that we’re making sound business decisions, managing the risks effectively, and achieving what we need to.
What do you do, and how does it help?
We selected Broadcom’s Clarity solution as our single system of record. It had a number of benefits that made it the obvious choice for us. Clarity integrated with the rest of our technology infrastructure, capturing financial information and feeding it to the main finance system, which triggers payments to suppliers and contractors. Clarity allows us to regularly and easily update financial forecasts, ensuring we always have an accurate understanding of the funding we need and the money we’re spending – critical when projects span multiple years.
The same is true for our resourcing – we can see allocations, understand and respond to variances from plan, and address upcoming bottlenecks before they cause problems. Individuals have more balanced workloads, resource owners see what is happening with much more clarity, and planning can take place with greater confidence that we have the people to deliver the work.
Clarity also gives us powerful reporting and the ability to integrate with our enterprise BI solution, helping us analyze our initiatives and ensuring that we make the best decisions at all times.
How is this driving your success?
Everyone involved with projects – from executives to team members, as well as contractors and suppliers – has a greater understanding of what is happening and greater confidence in the information they are receiving. That improves engagement and productivity, drives better business decisions, and ultimately improves value to our customers and ourselves. We have less risk, greater return on investment, better employee engagement, and greater understanding of what is happening – all for much less effort than with our old, manual approaches.