Capitol Health is an ASX-listed healthcare company that operates a network of diagnostic imaging clinics across Australia. It operates around 60 community-based imaging practices to meet a growing consumer demand for affordable, high-quality diagnostic imaging and related services. The company employs over 1,000 staff, including over 100 radiologists, delivering over 1.2 million procedures annually.
Lacking simple consolidation processes
Managing its financial operations from the same ERP system for over a decade, Capitol Health recognized its legacy solution was no longer fit for purpose.
Lorena Gordon, Head of Finance, Capitol Health, says, “We had been using the Great Plains version of Dynamics for over ten years. It was no longer supported, and we weren’t receiving any updates to the software. This business risk drove us to start looking for replacement financial software.”
One of the critical issues was that the company’s financial information sat within one cost centre.
“We needed a system that would allow us to split our information into different cost centers, including our individual clinics and subsidiary companies,” says Gordon. “Each month, to review company performance by clinic and by region, we had to move information out of the system into spreadsheets and do all those allocations manually.”
Because its legacy system could only support one cost center, Capitol Health’s finance team had to store important information outside the system.
"We do not wholly own certain companies within our structure, and for those, we had to keep information, such as trial balances and bank reconciliations, in spreadsheets,” explains Gordon.
Having information outside the system made it difficult to get an end-to-end picture of the business. “As an ASX-listed company, we felt it was important to modernize our system and have all the necessary information in one place. We wanted to reduce our reliance on spreadsheets, which can be time-consuming and error-prone to maintain.”
Capitol Health also wanted to address inefficient accounts payable (AP) processes by automating its invoice approval workflow.
Good training makes for smooth transition
Capitol Health considered several software solutions, but after discussing its requirements with DXC Technology, it opted for Microsoft’s cloud-based ERP application, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
“Business Central aligned better with the size of our company and our needs,” says Gordon. “We wanted to make it easy for our users across our clinic network to access the system, so we didn’t have to replicate computer power and equipment, which we were doing with our legacy solution.”
Over six months, DXC Practice for Microsoft partnered with Capitol Health to implement and transition users to the new system. During the implementation, DXC trained key users for several months and provided six weeks of post- go-live support.
It was a comprehensive project plan led by Capitol’s finance team. “All our accountants were involved in training across the core financial management modules and helping to prepare data to pour into the new system.”
Gordon recalls it was a busy period and involved cleansing data in fixed assets to ensure everything was in the correct format for the new application.
“We were very well looked after by DXC. Their project manager briefed us regularly and was always available to discuss any hurdles in the transition. DXC’s Dynamics consultant knew Business Central inside out and was proficient at providing specialist and end-user training.
“They collaborated with us to ensure templates were populated correctly and helped us deploy the system in a way that best matched our business objectives.”
A better way of working
After using the system for over a year, Gordon says the improvements to how the finance team operates are manifold.
“From my perspective, the data we can extract from the system using the standard reports is extremely valuable. We also like that we can easily export data for deeper analysis, modify it and upload it again.”
Processing invoices is now much simpler for the AP department, says Gordon. “We can get our operations team involved in the invoice workflow approval process, which was unavailable in Dynamics GP. The audit trail for approvals is excellent; we can see who the approvers are and where things are up to at each stage of the process.”
Thanks to Business Central’s vendor ledger, Capitol Health now has a more comprehensive view of its vendors and better visibility of any changes to information on vendor cards. “We can look at all our creditors more easily and quickly resolve outstanding balances.”
As part of the implementation, Capitol Health also implemented Jet Reports Professional to create more tailored business reports for non-finance team members.
“This gives our executive team access to P&L reports for individual clinics if needed. They can slice and dice data to see performance across various clinics and compare geographies. They also have access to the transactions behind the numbers if they want to dive deeper into details.”
Gordon concludes: “We have been able to retire our third-party creditor database because that information now lives in Business Central, which reduces our system footprint. We are now fully transitioned into DXC’s support processes and the partnership with DXC continues to flourish.”
