ERP is Not a Time-in-Grade Investment – Demand an ROI
By shifting their mindset around enterprise resource planning, healthcare leaders can go beyond technology implementation to strategically redesign, revitalize, and transform their operations.
The pressure is on for hospitals and health systems to transform financial and operational performance — but technology alone won’t solve the problems they face. Instead, organizations must wrap better processes and structure around the technologies they choose to drive efficiencies in day-to-day business operations that strengthen resilience.
For instance, most ERP initiatives focus solely on the ways in which ERP software can reduce corporate services expenses. When this happens, health systems miss vital opportunities to dig deep into the ways in which technology can enable business strategy to deliver the outcomes they desire. Breakdowns in value also occur when organizations bolt on new solutions to their existing ERP.
However, when healthcare organizations approach ERP not as a “lift and shift” project, but as a transformational initiative—gathering the organization’s future-state requirements and creating processes and teams that optimize use of technology to solve business challenges—they gain a holistic perspective that fuels sustainable improvement.
Six Tactics for Healthcare Leaders to Mitigate ERP Risks and Attain Desired Results
- Expand your perspective
- Determine the business case for change
- Evaluate the capacity for change
- Dedicate a portion of the professional services budget to independent risk management
- Demand and measure return on investment
- Focus heavily on workforce process optimization