Connected Planning - Capital Portfolio Planning & Capabilities

Today’s deep dive is about gaining control of your capital program!     

Are you managing your largest spending stream – your capital program - in Excel, Word, and Email?   How do you make sure stakeholders can collaborate around capital purchases and projects?    How do you maintain control of the capital budget while being flexible?  How do you make sure impacted groups like IT, Facilities, Operations, and Purchasing can collaborate and weigh in with requestors? 

Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning for Healthcare manages your short & long-term capital investment program by getting stakeholders proposing, assessing, and controlling capital spend with a modern process. It’s one of three pillars of Alithya’s Connected Planning for Healthcare (check out Mark Hite’s recent Connected Planning for Healthcare article!). 

Let’s learn about Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning for Healthcare and how it fits within the three pillars of connected planning. 

THREE CONNECTED PILLARS 🏛: 

Alithya’s Connected Planning for Healthcare is built upon Oracle EPM Cloud and gets Healthcare teams up and running with a modern planning and reporting solution. 

Oracle’s EPM Cloud is a modern, collaborative, social, and training foundation that connects the modern Healthcare organization with an integrated and collaborative planning platform.  Everyone can work from the same playbook and see how one department’s change impacts everyone else.   Stakeholders can plan, review, comment, and work together in one central platform – for the greater good of the organization. 

Alithya makes this possible with our Connected Planning for Healthcare with its three supportive pillars 🏛: 

• Pillar #1: Alithya Operational Integrated Planning for Healthcare – uses patient volumes to forecast patient & physician revenues, variable expenses, and provides an engine for labor & staff planning. 

• Pillar #2: Alithya Capital Portfolio Planning for Healthcare – manages the capital programming cycle from request to asset – including prioritization and approval, managing budgets, and projects.
  

• Pillar #3: Strategic and Long-Range Planning for Healthcare – combines Alithya Operational Integrated Planning and Alithya Capital Portfolio Planning to model and analyze the organization’s financing and performance for three to five years.   

TELL ME MORE ABOUT ALITHYA CAPITAL PORTFOLIO FOR HEALTHCARE! 

Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning for Healthcare - built upon Oracle EPM Planning - provides a streamlined, modern, and collaborative site for the organization to work together to manage their capital program.    

Two of our recent clients, Moffit Cancer Center and Thomas Jefferson University, spoke about their transformative experience, and you can catch some of their thoughts in a recent  video interview.    

Both clients came from Excel-driven processes where Finance collected capital investment requests via email and managed the capital budget in spreadsheets.   The process provided limited visibility into upcoming needs while fueling dissatisfaction among both stakeholders and staff.     

And, if you’d like to learn more about Moffitt Cancer Center’s business case and implementation, check out Oracle’s Partner Perspective Podcast - where Mark Hite and David Pabst share their insights. 

Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning for Healthcare is a prescriptive process to manage the entire capital management process – from Capital Request ➡️ Capital Budget ➡️ Capital Project ➡️ Capital Asset - following Alithya’s 5-step process: 

1. Requests – Allow functional areas - like Clinical, Facilities, Nursing, and IT - to build their own investment sandboxes and start thinking strategically. 
2. Prioritize – Allow managers and directors to analyze "must-have” and “nice to have” capital improvements, and layer in renovations, equipment replacements, and other investments.
3. Fund – Determine capital constraints and funding sources – whether from operations, debt, equity, grants, or fundraising.
4. Approve – When ready to solicit approval, promote requests through the approval workflow – up through Capital Committees and the Board of Directors.
5. Execute – Send key data elements from approved capital projects to the procure-to-pay system to allow requisitioning, while maintaining visibility and proper controls across all projects – and managing change requests, fiscal year carryforwards, and closures. 

PART OF A CONNECTED, INTEGRATED PROCESS FOR HEALTHCARE!  

Here are some examples of how our clients connect capital programming across their Three Pillars:  

• Building Strategic Capital Pipelines based on your committed investments + likely + and capital flex and analyzing these portfolios with Alithya’s Strategic and Long-Range Planning for Healthcare.   This helps answer questions like “do we need to raise funds if we roll out the new service” or “can we afford to accelerate our equipment replacement plan?” 

• Capturing operating impacts like patient volume changes or operating expense savings that are expected by making a given investment – and integrating with your overall financial forecast. 

• Forecasting depreciation for approved capital projects within your financial forecasting process.  

• Understanding your need for additional staffing relative to new capital projects and balancing demand with labor supply within your labor forecast.   

SEE FOR YOURSELF! 

If you’d like to see a demo of Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning - and how you can build Strategic Capital Pipelines, watch 📺our 3-part video series! 

1. An introduction to Capital Portfolio Planning and why it matters.
2. A demo of the capital request, capital budget, and management processes.
3. See a Strategic Capital Pipeline in action! 

Thanks for reading! 

To learn more about streamlining your capital programming process, please visit our solution page, read our solution brief or contact Alithya to request our capital programming assessment. 

David Pabst @datapabst, CPA\CITP PMP is a Practice Director and Oracle Ace Associate in Alithya’s Oracle practice.    In his role as Alithya’s Capital Portfolio Planning Product Manager, he works with clients looking to digitally-transform their capital planning.