Meridian Systems Inc - Custom Blast - 11/29/07

Case Study: Baptist Health South Florida
Largest Non-Profit Health Care Organization in South Florida Expects to Save Nearly $4M a Year in Construction Management Costs by Using Proliance^® Software

Baptist Health South Florida (BHSF) is a thriving non-profit health care system with more than 200 construction projects in progress at any given time. Management of projects ranging from a $50K floor renovation to a new hospital costing hundreds of millions of dollars consisted of paper-based processes, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and the manual routing of paper for approvals. Communication issues plagued this system, often causing construction delays and confusion around responsibility. This made it difficult to manage individual projects and get big picture information for executive management.

“Our manual system made communication difficult because it relied heavily on the construction management staff supplying up-to-date information and that didn’t always happen,” explains Petter Melau, Business Technology Consultant within BHSF’s IT group. “We realized that having a formalized project management system in place with a centralized data collection point would provide the structure needed to overcome our communication problems.”

After significant research, BHSF purchased Proliance software, a solution from Meridian Systems that combines project and portfolio management, facilities management, business process management and business analytics.

A Compelling Return on Investment
During its software selection process, BHSF looked extensively at return on investment (ROI).  “When we looked at ROI during the RFP process, we actually found that there was a lot of lost opportunity involved with our current manual operations,” Melau says.

In fact, while calculating the anticipated ROI of its Proliance software purchase, BHSF made a startling discovery: lost opportunity associated with manual project management was costing the organization millions of dollars each year!

Lost opportunity was identified for seven major categories:

• Cost of inflation
• Cost of rework
• Cost of delayed delivery
• Cost of unexpected liability
• Cost of staff inefficiency
• Cost of communication and interoperability issues
• Cost of inaccurate budgeting and approvals

For each category, the benefits derived from Proliance software were clearly defined and would later be used when outlining implementation objectives. These benefits included:

• Compression of planning, design and approval schedules via more efficient management of RFI’s, change management and collaboration
• Standardization of workflow and automation of communications per BHSF best practices
• Reduced cycle times for correspondence and approvals
• The ability to minimize staffing needs while growing the construction pipeline (due to greater efficiencies)
• The replacement of multiple systems of record with a single, enterprise level system to manage scope, budget, schedule and collaboration
• The ability to maximize the annual construction budget through proper breakdown of budgets, costs and approvals

When the ROI evaluation was complete, BHSF was able to quantify the return on its Proliance software purchase. “Proliance will save us close to $4M a year in construction management costs,” states Melau. “That’s a pretty compelling ROI factor.”

Read the complete BHSF case study, including chapters on:

• Runding Corporation Leads Successful Implementation
• Reporting Takes Construction Management to a Higher Level
• One System for Information Management