Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center Realizes 30%+ Faster Budgeting

Top Regional Hospital Discovers the Power of Partnership

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center (PVHMC) originally came to Syntellis for a budgeting solution that would reduce overwhelming, manual processes that negatively impacted finance staff productivity. Soon, the PVHMC finance team found several added bonuses that brought additional efficiencies and confidence to their operations.

Hear what our client has to say

Axiom™ Performance Reporting, the reporting function of the budgeting software, began as a nice bonus before the finance staff recognized its power to transform decision-making, says Andrew Dire, Controller of the nonprofit community medical center in Pomona, California. The power of Axiom didn’t stop there. Combine budgeting and performance reporting with Syntellis’ commitment to bringing continued value to the relationship, and PVHMC discovered they had a true partner.

“When I ask a question, [Syntellis] understands what issue I’m trying to solve, which often takes us in a different — but better — direction. Honestly, I wish more software providers would do this.”

Bringing Budgeting into the Modern Age

Dire estimates that Axiom™ Budgeting introduced time savings of at least 30% to the process of compiling data and creating the budget. He believes more efficiencies are possible as the staff of two accountants and two clerks become more familiar with the system. Dire recounts the previous budget process by saying, “The inefficiencies were myriad.”

Manual data entry fed spreadsheets, which was a time-consuming and error-prone process. Finance staff usually recruited auxiliary volunteers to pitch in, but it still required nearly a week to input the data. The budget document consisted of several spreadsheets with more than a dozen tabs each that fed the master document. Balancing errors were common, adding days to the budget process.

“The spreading was all done manually after the budgets were compiled,” Dire says. “The chance of error was high. It went through four moves before it got to its final resting place — from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet, to an aggregation spreadsheet, to finally getting posted.”

While exploring budgeting software, Axiom quickly stood out among competitors. “We didn’t find anything in the marketplace that was doing what Axiom was doing,” Dire says. “The thing we appreciated the most was how integrated the system was, with one database feeding all the reports, and everything pulling from that same place.”
 

Performance Reporting Adds Stakeholder Value

PVHMC already had a performance reporting tool, so Dire was pleasantly surprised and pleased to discover Axiom's robust performance reporting capabilities. Because Axiom serves as a single source of truth, creating reports is a breeze, with Dire estimating time savings of up to 90% over previous endeavors.

Recently, the CFO asked for a last-minute labor report related to a FEMA application that could mean as much as $12 million to the hospital. Before Axiom, Dire said he would need a week to pull reports out of the payroll system, pay period by pay period, compile them by job code, and calculate average hourly rates. With Axiom, he completed the task in 30 minutes.

“It’s not just the efficiency gains — it’s all the things we can do with Axiom that we never could do before,” Dire says. “It’s a huge help to definitively answer questions we could previously only guess at.”

New reports include materials management and an accounts payable report that displays an icon to easily pull up the relevant invoice. Dire is especially looking forward to performing variance reporting, a new capability for the hospital.

“Now that we have engaged the performance reporting side of [Axiom Budgeting], I’m getting positive feedback from users who appreciate the depth of information available to them.”
 

‘We Can Focus on Higher-Value Work’

The benefits from Axiom Budgeting have cascaded throughout the organization. Dire says he writes few reports anymore because they are already available in the system. Finance staff no longer have to talk through the budget with department heads to receive approval, because approvals are built in as the document electronically moves from reviewer to reviewer.

“I’m spending most of my time performing higher-value activities, because Axiom does the heavy lifting required to bring the data together, format it in a way we can readily leverage, and create reports that provide a real-world glimpse at how we are performing as an organization,” Dire says.

He also appreciates Syntellis representatives for their superior, proactive service after the sale. “Syntellis reached out to us and said, “We’d like to have a quarterly update call with you,” Dire recalls. “During our calls, they usually ask me questions that I didn’t think to ask about how things work, and I appreciate that support.”

“It’s refreshing that they’re calling us up to make sure that we’re using their software with best practice,” Dire says.
 

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Fast Facts

• 30%+ faster budgeting processes
• 90% faster reporting functionality
• Integrated system brings single source of truth

Organization Profile

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, Pomona, California

• 412-bed, nonprofit community medical center, serving eastern Los Angeles and western San Bernardino counties
• Largest non-public trauma center in Los Angeles County
• S. News & World Report “Best Regional Hospital” 2020-2021
• 4,200 employees, including 700 physicians
• 1,000-person hospital Auxiliary