In the midst of a pandemic, there’s no time to waste in ensuring hospitals run optimally.
For leading private hospital group Lenmed, the acquisition of a new hospital sparked a rapid and highly-effective process of onboarding the new facility to its core SAP system that was recognised as the best-in-class at the recent SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success.
“We had acquired the Howick Private Hospital, but their users were not familiar with the SAP environment,” says Ashley Strydom, group CIO and Procurement Head at Lenmed. “We worked with our implementation partner Gijima to complete a full implementation and onboarding in under twelve weeks.”
The Lenmed Group was established in 1984 with a focus on providing exceptional private care to the communities in which its hospitals operate.
It employs more than 1850 people across its twelve hospitals, and is operational in South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique, with its headquarters in Roodepoort west of Johannesburg.
Strydom and his team worked with Gijima with a clear view of their core business goals, including a fast, accurate and clean implementation, a focus on reduced complexity and cost control, and standardising hospital processes across the group.
“It was essential that there was no disruption to any of our business processes during the implementation,” says Strydom. “We used our standard Lenmed SAP template and relied on best practices to ensure there were no customisations and scope creep. This resulted in faster implementation time and reduced costs.”
With visible executive support, clear communication plans and well-defined roles and responsibilities, supported by a strict governance program, Lenmed was able to execute a fast, accurate and clean SAP implementation.
“By following the same implementation methodology and governance framework as previous Lenmed SAP implementations, we were able to meet the tight twelve-week project deadline while also achieving a project cost saving of nearly 40%,” says Strydom.
The implementation covered all core processes, including finance, human resources, material management, patient management, patient accounting, and authorisations. Strydom and implementation partner Gijima used the SAP Activate implementation methodology, with a once-off go-live for all SAP modules and interfaces.
With new users who were not familiar with the SAP environment, Strydom had to implement new processes to align Howick Private Hospital to the Lenmed Group’s SAP processes. “We were able to immediately include the new hospital in our group reporting, and managed the full implementation with no disruption to the hospital’s operations. As we plan further acquisitions, the lessons learned during this project and the reusability of our SAP implementation template will support group efforts at containing costs.”
Cameron Beveridge, regional director for Southern Africa at SAP, notes Lenmed’s rapid implementation and superb cost management as key contributing factors to the success of the implementation.
“By building on its past successes and working with an expert partner, Lenmed has provided a test case of how organisations can rapidly transform their business processes without any disruption to its normal operations. With an exemplary implementation model that was recognised as the best in class for rapid time to value at the recent SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success, Lenmed can confidently grow its footprint through further acquisitions, safe in the knowledge that any new hospitals can be quickly and cost-effectively onboarded to its core SAP systems,” Beveridge said.
