Healthcare M&A boom: Rapid mergers and acquisitions are driving the need for streamlined financial consolidation across multiple, often global, entities.
Consolidation challenges: Manual reporting leads to errors, inefficiencies, and slow decision-making. Modern ERP platforms digitize, centralize, and automate financial processes to keep up with growth.
Infrastructure strain: Legacy, on-premises systems struggle with scaling, high maintenance costs, and multi-currency/tax complexities. Cloud-based ERP like Business Central with Binary Stream provides agility, stability, and global standardization.
Financial reporting needs: Manual statement consolidation is error-prone and time-consuming. Modern ERP delivers real-time, accurate, centralized reporting for faster, more informed decision-making.
Keys to successful consolidation:
What to look for in ERP:
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Binary Stream offer industry-specific tools for multi-entity management, billing, leasing, and healthcare supply chains.
The healthcare industry is in the midst of a boom in mergers and acquisitions, spurred on by the never-ending demand for growth. This unprecedented uptick in mergers presents a unique and never before faced set of challenges for healthcare businesses as they try to synchronize workflows, processes, and systems between multiple, sometimes international, locations. This is especially challenging for the financial side of things, leading to an increased importance of financial consolidation.
Financial consolidation refers to an organization's ability to integrate and maintain financial records and data across multiple locations, whether it is a hospital chain, labs, outpatient clinics, or other specialized locations. The scale and complexity of the task can be challenging for businesses, however, choosing the right tools to power your systems can make a world of difference.
The focus on growth via acquisitions and mergers means businesses must have the capacity to scale their operations rapidly. For financials, this means having the agility to digitize and centralize financial operations like record keeping and reporting. Attempting to maintain manual reporting or record keeping will turn the financial department into an anchor, holding the business down.
Some of the common roadblocks when attempting to keep financial departments manual are low-quality data, primarily because of human error being introduced during the data entry process, long data entry times due to the sheer amount of data to be registered in the systems, or by using multiple different systems that do not integrate successfully.
To successfully navigate the uncharted waters of growth, businesses need to be powered by a modern, agile ERP platform that can digitize, standardize, and even automate functions across all departments and locations. A top of the line, industry-optimized solution, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Binary Stream, will give healthcare businesses the flexibility and agility to scale their operations to their growth.
Growth can cause similar problems for the physical infrastructure of a business, as well. Businesses operating with legacy, on-site systems will struggle to support the added resources required to run an expanding business. More servers, higher maintenance costs, and additional user licenses all add up to an expensive headache that must be dealt with, rather than a tool to make business run smoothly. Financial systems are affected similarly, which is especially challenging for businesses operating in multiple locations that require currency and tax support for multiple jurisdictions. A modern platform like BC with Binary Stream enables businesses to operate easily across every location, regardless of geographic situation, by standardizing systems and workflows and acting as a central repository of all data for the entirety of the business, ending information siloing. This allows for growth to happen organically, without affecting system stability or worker efficiency because of downtime.
As businesses grow, tasks such as creating financial statements or compiling and delivering financial reporting can become increasingly complicated, eventually leading to frustration for users and leaders alike.
Manually integrating financial statements from every location in an expanded business, then having to cross-check for accuracy, is a time-consuming process fraught with opportunities to introduce costly human errors into the system. A modern platform centralizes all the data automatically, allowing for quick and accurate financial statements to be generated anytime, rather than a lengthy delay between request and receipt for compiling.
Reporting receives similar boosts under a modern platform such as Dynamics 365 BC, which features an in-depth reporting suite. By utilizing a modern system with a centralized database, rather than having each individual location control its own data, businesses can generate reports showing the entire business quickly and easily, no longer constricted by geographic location, business line, or other access-based restriction.
The mission seems clear- to best consolidate financial systems post-acquisition or merger, a modern, agile ERP platform is required. Upgrading to a modern ERP platform is a huge decision that affects every aspect of a business, and should never be made lightly. The key to a successful transition is planning, and that effort starts at the very top of an organization. Leadership engagement is key to a successful switch to a modern platform, as any attempts to change the corporate culture begin at the executive level. This change comes from creating a vision for the future of the business, and effectively communicating that vision to employees in every area.
Once leadership is engaged, the focus becomes choosing the right ERP platform. Engaging with employees who will be working with the system in their day-to-day duties is vital, as it can give the change management team a clear idea of what the needs and priorities should be, which can often look different from the outside. Once a clear idea of the needs and priorities has been established, the search for the right platform and right partner can begin.
The right ERP platform will provide your expanding healthcare business with the secure, stable foundation needed to operate at peak capacity and efficiency during times of growth. Not every platform is built the same, and the best of the best will share the following qualities.
One of the key features of any new ERP platform is that it must provide one central database for all of a businesses' data to reside. As businesses expand, operating with a centralized system will save countless hours when it comes to record keeping. This impacts not simply customer and patient records, where complicated and strict compliance laws govern everything from how they are stored to what can be accessed, but also inter-company records, such as financial data, purchases, employee payroll, and building-based records.
Having a central hub also drastically reduces the time and effort required to complete inter-company transactions, as records no longer have to be updated and maintained in two separate locations, as all buildings and departments within the business operate in the same system, regardless of physical location. Top-tier systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Binary Stream will even offer AI tools to automate some of these tasks, lowering the time and error risk to almost nothing.
Finally, a centralized data hub has a significant impact on the quality of reporting available, both financial and otherwise. With an always-live, always-accessible system, reports are never more than a few clicks away, always up to date with the most recent data. This eliminates lag as reports have to be compiled from various sources and consolidated into one business-wide report, helping power better and quicker decision making across all levels.
Perhaps the most important aspect of a new ERP system for an expanding healthcare organization is that it is cloud-based. Untethering from legacy, on-premises servers is a key step in becoming a scalable, growth-focused organization. The ability to access system data, records, and processes from locations outside of the office is key, particularly when healthcare organizations are operating with multiple locations, often located great distances apart. Employees at outlying hospitals will have the same access to the same data as users at the "main" branch, meaning better care for patients and a better customer experience.
A cloud-based solution also offers better security protection, a vital concern for healthcare businesses. Healthcare and medical businesses face more cyber-threats yearly than any other industry and also have the steepest penalties for cyber-breaches. A cloud-based ERP will protect the entire system- every location, every piece of data, and every access point. No longer having to protect physical servers from natural disasters, power outages, or other downtime-causing events also offers peace of mind to businesses, knowing they will remain operational no matter the circumstances.
Finally, the cost savings of a cloud platform are no small matter. No longer having to house and maintain servers on premises is a considerable savings, both in utilities usage and in the man-hours required to maintain them. Additionally, a cloud-based solution is usually more cost-effective for scaling, as the ability to add new users does not depend on how many servers can be housed on premises, and user licenses are priced accordingly.
With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that a modern, agile solution, specifically tailored to the unique challenges of expanding medical businesses, is the right choice. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the top of the class choice, and when combined with the powerful, industry-specific tools of Binary Stream, it is clearly the best option for powering healthcare businesses of all sizes and locations.
Binary Stream offers solutions tailored to solving the unique challenges faced by medical and healthcare businesses, with multi-entity management tools to manage property and leasing for companies with multiple locations, billing solutions to handle collections and payments, and healthcare materials procurement tools to manage supply chains and product issues.
By choosing to operate with BC and Binary Stream as an EPR platform, healthcare businesses position themselves to be leaders in the ever-intensifying race to expand and consolidate, arming their employees with all the tools they need to operate effectively and efficiently, no matter their role or location.