Improving Business Efficiency at Greeley with OpenAir
Background
Greeley is a healthcare consulting company headquartered in the greater Boston area. The company provides solutions through consulting, education, interim staffing, credentialing management, and external peer review. In the past three years, Greeley has provided services to over 700 healthcare organizations across the US. Their unique approach in offering practical solutions has provided clients with improvements in patient satisfaction, staff engagement, efficiency, quality, and cost reduction.
Business Challenges
As Greeley flourished, their computer system quickly became ineffective. Greeley had been on the same system since 2005, and to meet clients’ billing, staffing, and informational needs, they were forced to implement manual workarounds.
Greeley Operations staff resorted to manually creating invoices and statements of accounts to make up for the system’s limitations. Sometimes this included creating multiple invoices for single clients with multiple cost centers for clients who were provided more than one service. This information had to be manually combined in order for Greeley to create an accurate portrayal of the account. With the existing computer system, Greeley field staff was unable to enter and access their own data. Therefore, expense reports were manually created by one person using spreadsheets.
Greeley leadership was unable to access reports from their current system quickly. In order for Greeley leadership to access these reports, they were required to wait on manual reporting for each request. In the past, Crystal Reports had been used to access this data, but utilizing this system was not a skillset the Operations team had retained, adding to the effort when new reports were needed.
Overall, Greeley was displeased with the number of hours invested in tasks that should have been automated and how difficult it was to access data for reporting and decision making.
Solution
Greeley brought in Top Step to implement the NetSuite OpenAir PSA software. After completing the business efficiency review to ensure a clear understanding of Greeley’s goals and objectives for the new PSA system, business model and business operation process, Top Step developed the plan to customize Greeley’s implementation of OpenAir to support their needs.
One example of the business efficiency improvements was reporting. Prior to implementing the OpenAir system, reporting was completed through manual effort or through the use of Crystal Reports. The customized implementation of OpenAir allows the Greeley field staff to easily enter their time and expenses directly into the system. They have also configured their revenue rules within OpenAir in a way they can now spend much less time trying to get data out of the system. Before the new OpenAir system, at the end of the month, Greeley would spend hours trying to figure out revenue by resources. Now reporting is simplified and automated. The Operations team has the ability to access the data they need and the executive team has the visability and information they need without manual effort.
Another improvement was reducing time in the invoicing process. Previously it was a very long and manual process, requiring Greeley to print each invoice to PDF and then email it. If Greeley’s customer required receipts they would also have to pull these and manually attach. Now sending invoices is automated and if receipts are required it is as simple as clicking a link and the receipts are attached.
The OpenAir implementation wasn’t just an “install and configure” project. The Top Step team took the time to empower Greeley with knowledge about how to customize the OpenAir solution for its specific business needs.
Before the project’s completion, Top Step reviewed common troubleshooting processes with the Greeley Operations team, empowering them to take ownership of their solution and reduce their dependency on outside consultants. Even after the project’s completion, Top Step remains accessible to Greeley’s team, ensuring the system transition was successfully adopted by the entire team and working to their satisfaction.
“Top Step Consulting definitely exceeded my expectations. They’re an organization that CARES about your success, and their goal is to teach and pass the knowledge on so you can become an independent user.”
– Denise, Greeley Director of Operations
Results
The customized Open Air solution exceeded Greeley’s expectations. Top Step’s OpenAir expertise and willingness to educate Greeley’s Operations team resulted in a successful transition to a more robust system.
Because of the custom solution through education and commitment to success provided by the Top Step team, Greeley has been able to save time through the efficiency improvements which in turn allows them to better serve their clients.
Greeley reduced manual hours by nearly 50%, improved field data collection, eliminated duplicate effort, and made reporting easy and efficient.
In addition, the customized implementation of OpenAir has improved customer satisfaction. Greeley prides themselves as being the best consulting organization in their industry and understands that every interaction with a customer is important. Greeley’s clients now experience a greatly improved invoice-to-pay process. The manual process used prior to OpenAir was not only time consuming but highly at risk for error and duplication. Now, not only is the customer happier with the consistent and quality process that is a reflection of the Greeley brand, Greeley reaps the benefits of a shorter invoice-to-pay cycle.
The results provided by Top Step’s support have given Greeley the confidence to move forward into the next phase of the project. When referring to Top Step’s team who helped implement these changes, Denise said, “They are smart, they care, and I trust their answers.”
Top Step has helped Greeley succeed both internally and with their clients.
