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Custom Reports: Golden Adds Value & Beats the Learning Curve
Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics
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On an ordinary day, time is precious in a human resources department that oversees 4,200 employees. In the midst of its migration to a new human resources reporting system, the HR department at Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics found time even more dear. Report developers at Golden Consulting Group, LLC (Golden) helped Children’s Mercy navigate a complicated migration while gaining insight, rather than losing precious time.
The Client
As Kansas City's exclusive pediatric medical center and health care network, Children’s Mercy offers a comprehensive range of inpatient and outpatient pediatric health care. The hospital offers leading programs in pediatric bone marrow transplant, pediatric heart surgery, neonatal intensive care, pediatric minimally invasive surgery, and more. Named one of the top children’s hospitals in America by Child magazine, this nonprofit hospital provides over $12 million in charity care each year.
Children’s Mercy began with one bed in 1897 and has grown to include a state-of-the-art, 241-bed hospital and bustling outpatient clinics in Kansas City, a 54-bed hospital and outpatient center in suburban Johnson County, Kansas, and outreach clinics in outlying communities. The hospital also pursues a dramatic research vision that includes laboratory research in genetics, pharmacology, cancer, neonatology, immunology and nursing. With a medical staff of nearly 600 pediatric specialists, Children’s Mercy can focus on children and their unique needs.
The Challenge
Children’s Mercy chose to migrate to Kronos Workforce HR/PayrollTM (Kronos) to manage its 4,200 employees because it offered more functionality than the hospital’s previous system. Furthermore, the Kronos system could be managed conveniently on a homegrown intranet site through a menu-driven system.
HR needed the Kronos application to monitor workmen’s compensation, demonstrate compliance with state and federal EEO regulations, and track changes in open enrollments and benefits eligibility. The Kronos package, however, did not include a pre-existing mechanism to track this information. Children’s Mercy would need to create custom reports driven by stored procedures in the system which would support the running of the reports time after time. Making information available to the reports through these procedures posed a new challenge. “In the past, I could write a report in 30 minutes,” explains Charles Burnell, Manager of Financial Systems. “Now working with the stored procedure so that we can have long-term capabilities means that creating a report could take me an entire day or more.”
In the midst of adopting a new HR system, the hospital’s busy information systems team could not spare the time and resources required to write these reports. “We’re very busy with our day-to-day work and learning to use a new system successfully,” says Sally Fields, HR Information Systems Specialist. “There’s no time to stop and work on a report.”
Golden’s Smart Solution
A Golden instructor had trained the hospital staff on the Kronos system, and when HR needed a partner to migrate its custom reports, the hospital turned to Golden. Golden offered Children’s Mercy a threefold benefit: a dedicated team of report-developers, expert knowledge of the Kronos application databases, and the ability to tie the hospital’s operational needs to data extraction and report generation.
Golden’s Partner Solutions division dedicated skilled report developers to the Children’s Mercy migration. By establishing close working relationships with the hospital staff, these developers could understand and address the hospital’s needs and concerns. Fields was impressed by their accessibility and responsiveness. “We had genuine communication,” she remarked. “They really listen.”
As an official Kronos partner, Golden also offered Children’s Mercy expert knowledge of the Workforce product and database structure. Golden’s staff knew exactly how to create reports driven by stored procedures. “Because Golden’s developers were familiar with how our database works, they could take the information I provided and run with it,” Fields explained.
Once they understood the hospital’s business requirements, Golden’s developers were able to extract the necessary information from the database and generate reports that met those operational needs. When Children’s Mercy received reports that didn’t work as anticipated, Golden’s developers were flexible and ready to make modifications. “They’re great troubleshooters,” Fields commented. This willingness to modify their work demonstrated the developers’ interest in making their reports as useful as possible.
When done, Golden created over 40 reports that touch all aspects of the hospital’s workforce systems.
The Results
By partnering with a Kronos expert, Children’s Mercy was able to deploy its new HR system ahead of the learning curve. Rather than sacrifice its own resources to spend days creating new reports, the hospital focused on its operational needs and let Golden worry about the one-time task of creating reports. “We would still be developing the reports ourselves if not for Golden’s help and expertise,” says Burnell with relief.
During their first open enrollment period after the migration, HR specialists knew instantly how many employees had already enrolled so they could track those who had not. Timely reporting was essential during this busy time. “I couldn’t have made it through open enrollment without such timely information,” says Fields. “Golden’s report gave me the information I needed to move on.”
With Golden’s expertise, Children’s Mercy initially saved time and gains insight each day in the operation of their business. Clearly for this hospital, time is money and insight is Golden!
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