Baptist Memorial Health Care recently named Margaret Chisholm Massey as the system director of Baptist OneSource, our new enterprise resource planning tool from Oracle. Massey has been with Baptist for 34 years, and now she’s taking on the important role of helping Baptist implement its new financial system. We talked with Margaret to learn more about what Baptist OneSource will mean for the organization.
Could you tell us about the changes Baptist is making with enterprise resource planning?
We’re changing to a new enterprise resource planning tool, which we will use to prepare budgets; perform treasury functions; pay our bills; track capital, assets and leases; purchase, store and issue supplies; compensate team members; and maintain benefits. We have used Lawson for many years, and the industry has changed during that time. We decided to search for a replacement system that would serve us for many more years into the future, and we chose Oracle.
We also hired PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for project management and consulting. They’ve been helping us update and standardize our structure, design our workflows and document our processes. We’re thinking about how things may change in health care, and PwC’s advice is helping us build for the future.
What will Baptist OneSource do when it’s fully implemented?
Baptist OneSource will bring greater efficiency by allowing us to integrate and perform all of our financial transactions across the organization using the same application. We’re also taking this opportunity to standardize some of our processes and introduce best practices. Having standard processes across all entities, such as the same numbering and naming conventions, will increase our efficiency and make it easier to obtain good data to make great decisions.
Unlike with Lawson, Baptist OneSource will be a cloud application. It will run faster and be fully integrated with all of our entities. Our calculations will be more streamlined with fewer manual interventions, and the data analytics will give our managers across the organization better information in a timelier fashion.
What is the timeline?
We will begin with the budgeting process as the first application we implement in May. Everything else will be live for the next fiscal year on October 1, 2024. We’re already working on those conversions. We’re putting our historical data into the budgeting application so that we’ll be ready to start doing projections for the following fiscal year.
Anything to add?
This is really exciting. We haven’t implemented a new financial system in quite some time. It’s important that we’re introducing best practices and working to streamline our processes and improve efficiency, but it’s also vital that we’re planning for the future now. Health care is going to change; it always does.
