60%
Annualized Cost Savings Per Circuit
90%
of hospitals have adopted mobile technology and say it is helping to improve patient safety and outcomes
Case Study
Growing Healthcare System Merges and Manages Legacy Communications Networks with Sakon
Phase 2:
Invoice Processing and Payment
Phase 1:
Getting a Grip on Inventory
Comprehensive Inventory
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Sakon’s comprehensive store of location-specific inventory – along with the precision reporting it enables – has also helped the healthcare provider in unanticipated ways. For example, inventory visibility has played a vital role in helping the health network secure several hundred thousand dollars in Universal Service Administration Company (USAC) subsidies.
Administering nearly $10 billion in funds annually, USAC supports healthcare facilities in bringing world-class medical care to rural areas through increased broadband capabilities. Using reports generated by the Sakon platform, the client has eliminated the need for third-party validation of eligible locations, streamlining and improving the accuracy of the qualification process.
Results
250,000 line-item inventory build completed in 90 days.
The Situation
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Implementations run faster when vendors and clients run together... and that was certainly the case here.
Having recently merged with a large partner network, this west-coast, not-for-profit healthcare system needed to rationalize its legacy communications networks and manage them on a single platform. Previously reliant on home-grown solutions and manual processes to handle wireline and wireless lifecycle services, this client turned to Sakon for an automation and optimization advantage that has delivered millions of dollars in savings, pervasive process efficiencies, and newfound visibility into, and control over, its communications services environment.
Fast facts
This regional non-profit healthcare network serves the needs of 5 million patients across several Western states
2,500
Number of Locations
120,000+
Employees and caregivers
$60,000,000
Annual Communications Spend
At a glance
With the help of the client, Sakon embarked on an aggressive inventory build, one that encompassed 2,500 locations and resulted in over 250,000 line items being captured in the Sakon platform, including MPLS, VOIP, SIP trunks, and local lines. And it happened at breakneck speed – just three short months.
With Sakon, all wireline and wireless invoices are entered into the platform, leveraging the platform’s 3-Way Match functionality to compare invoice charges to previous invoices, contract terms, and existing inventory.
Invoices are then directed to internal staff through an automated workflow for review and approval before being paid in the platform. Today, nearly 2,000 invoices a month are processed and paid hands-free in Sakon, accounting for nearly $5 million in monthly recurring charges.
While bringing more than 250,000 line items of inventory onto Sakon and taming wireline procure-to-pay process complexities were paramount to the hospital network, so too was managing mobility. As iPads, tablets, laptops and other devices have proliferated among caregivers and across care facilities, ensuring they are available when needed, working properly, and on the right plans with cost allocated correctly, has grown more mission critical.
With Sakon’s managed mobility services (MMS) offerings, the healthcare provider enables doctors and other staff to order new devices from an approved catalog in the platform, while Sakon orchestrates the backend services needed to deliver, maintain, fix, and retire them. The platform also provides mobile usage and plan visibility to location managers, helping them control costs for over 12,000 devices.
Making the Most of Mobility
The gift that keeps on giving
When this West Coast, not-for-profit healthcare system merged with a like-sized partner, it not only found itself supervising over 50 hospitals, 800 clinics, and 120,000 caregivers in service of 5 million patients, it also had to contend with two unwieldy legacy communications networks and an outdated manual approach to managing them.
Having reached critical mass for providing high quality care to patients – regardless of their ability to pay – across several states, this burgeoning healthcare network needed a better way to support its needs-based mission with a more up-to-date communications network and an agile, cost-effective system to run it.
Introduction
Single platform for automation of wireline and wireless procure-to-pay processes, including orchestration of mobility lifecycle management services.
Centralized visibility and control of communications services has generated millions of dollars in savings, while helping client secure important USAC subsidies in rural areas.
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We are extremely proud of how quickly we built the client’s inventory – in this case from scratch, because they had no prior TEM – in the Sakon platform
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John Venditti
VP, Implementation
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Sakon provides a leading cloud-based connectivity spend management and mobile operations platform. The purpose-built platform connects organization with suppliers globally, provides visibility into and control over how companies spend on communications services and enables businesses to achieve significant savings. The company markets its platform to a range of enterprises in various industries, such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, financial services, manufacturing, technology, and others through a direct sales force as well as partnerships with leading systems integrators, technology alliance partners and communications service providers. The company was founded in 2003, has over 650 employees with offices in US, Canada, UK, India and is headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts.
About Sakon