Medihelp, one of South Africa's largest private medical schemes with more than 218 000 beneficiaries, has implemented Lawson's Financials software suite to automate and improve its financial business processes.
"Lawson provides Medihelp with the ability to forecast budget fluctuations and make informed decisions across the organisation, giving senior management the information they need to make strategic decisions," says Debbie Klue, executive manager of resources at Medihelp.
"We wanted a scalable solution that would integrate easily with our in-house developed Med2000 administration system and provide us with greater reporting capabilities to facilitate our operations across the organisation," says Klue. "Lawson's reporting capabilities and its accessibility to financial and non-financial staff means that it offers us all the functionality we require at a reasonable price. This allows us to focus on our core purpose, which is to provide our members with prompt and efficient service."
Medihelp began investigating various solutions in March 2001. The company's financial system was still running on a mainframe and the decision had been taken to move to a networked environment to reduce the total cost of ownership. Lawson Financials replaced the company's general ledger system, which ran on Med2000. The in-house administration system handles all financial processing, including member and supplier claims, processing and payments. It includes a database of member and supplier details. With Lawson Financials, integration to Med2000 proved to be seamless. Med2000 interfaces with Lawson, with the system set up to automatically generate data files.
"Prior to Lawson, we also had a creditors system running on Med2000, which required a lot of manual interventions," says Klue. "Now all manual processes have been automated, enhancing internal controls and providing drill-around capability on all transactions."
Drill-around allows users to review details about a transaction for informed decision-making. With this feature, Lawson allows Medihelp to generate and analyse information according to different schemes and business units, enabling users to pinpoint the information they require and to spend more time analysing this information and less gathering it. Lawson integrates with all financial reports needed throughout the medical scheme, and produces customisable reports that are used by management to make critical business decisions.
"In our line of business, it is essential to have accurate financial information readily available," says Klue. "Now everyone, from our CEO down to staff across our individual business units, can access the data they need whereas before, they would have to physically go and locate the files containing the information they were after."
Gerhard Visser, MD of Solit iNovations, the African representative for Lawson products and services, says Lawson has tailored its financial solution to the healthcare industry and has focused on reducing costs, increasing efficiencies and improving the bottom line to provide a return on investment that distinguishes it from many other ERP systems.
"Lawson allows financial executives to manage the entire scope of their operations, from accounts payable and receivable, cash flow, financial regulatory compliance and analysis and reporting. By addressing Medihelp's information management needs, it makes the company's information easier to use and understand, enabling it to better compete in the healthcare market."
Medihelp plans to implement Lawson Financials' asset management module, and to integrate its VIP payroll system into the ledger. This will be followed by the implementation of Lawson's requisition module, ensuring the integration of all the company's financial subsystems.Internationally, Lawson serves six of the top 10 largest healthcare systems and has more than 500 clients in the healthcare sector.
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