Our client, a thriving University Hospital, with multiple campuses, students, interns, and doctors from all over the globe enables medical, biological, chemical, and health sciences students to conduct research in many classrooms, laboratories, clinics, hospitals, and other locations all over their state. Our client needed a robust ERP system to help manage its multiple facilities and a large volume of supplies and operating purchases every month.
Our client determined that it needed to become a highly scalable, digital and cloud-based enterprise. They previously operated on time-consuming manual purchasing, accounts payable and disbursement processes. The university hired Intone to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform to manage purchase, streamline approval processes and create automation and consolidation of accounts for payable and disbursement functions. Intone’s proven implementation strategy consists of Roadmap development planning and preparation, design, configuration and build, data migration, testing and training for the go-live date.
Our experienced project manager and SME’s were key to the successful NetSuite implementation. Effective purchasing and cash management is a key major function of our client’s hospital and academic operations as the university processes thousands of invoices per month and needed to replace an overly paper-driven and very inefficient process. In addition to systems selection and implementation, our client engaged with us to integrate purchasing, accounts payable and cash management directly into NetSuite and develop standardized purchase order (PO) approval, accounts payable and cash management processes and procedures.
The Intone team worked with the client to improve operating inefficiencies through the reduction of manual efforts, processing errors and re-work centralization along with controlled disbursements of cash. Intone selected and implemented a key system within NetSuite to automate orders and billing for key vendors.
Through cXML (Commerce Extensible Markup Language) and the punch out the mechanism, buyers can access a supplier’s punch out enabled e-commerce websites can be automatically logged in, search the catalog, configure items, add them to the shopping cart, and return the cart as a pending purchase order back to the procurement system.
A punch-out website is a standard e-commerce website with the special ability to communicate directly with a procurement system through cXML and return a pending purchase order back to the buyer, so there is no need to enter product information in the procurement system. Once payment is generated, a payables file is created and validated. The related records are produced within NetSuite to eliminate duplicate payments. This functionality and capability were very critical and important to our client university hospital because of the large number of monthly purchase transactions.
Our engagement provided for a more intuitive and effective procurement and cash management processes through the development of an automated procurement/purchasing process within NetSuite (the punch out module). At the point when approvers sign in to NetSuite, they can see dashboards with details that help in the endorsement. When approvers are performing duties outside of the system, the module sends an email if approval is time-sensitive.
The detailed status of any line item within the process is readily available with priority rankings of importance and eliminates the inefficient, catch-all, generic ‘pending’ status. These new procurement/purchasing/cash disbursement and management processes provided for innovation in a number of ways:
Visibility into purchasing, including details about controlled substances; customized dashboards and email alerts to fit the needs of approvers; punch-out’s to enable online ordering and payments accessible from the NetSuite interface including process automation to increase efficiency and approval processes.
The hospital has experienced a reduction in costs, now by not missing discount terms for accounts payable, more visibility of their accounts receivables, and the ability to finalize more bulk purchases. The centralization of controlled disbursements has also been key drivers for exponentially more effective cash management for the university.