Apria Healthcare

Business challenge
Apria aims to expand its high-quality care services into new
markets. Cost-savings could help it to unlock capital to invest
in growth—but manual forecasting made it difficult to identify
cost centers.
Transformation
Apria worked with partner Aviana to replace its
spreadsheet-driven forecasting system with a centralized, bestpractice approach—laying the foundation for a more efficient
operating structure.
Business benefits:
Reveals
new insights into the true
costs of operating a large
healthcare business
Highlights
opportunities to redirect
investment to investments
that enhance care
Boosts
competitiveness by enabling
smarter pricing to meet
customer needs
Apria Healthcare
Using accurate forecasts to
enable more competitive
healthcare services
Apria is one of the United States’ leading providers of home respiratory services
and related medical equipment, used in areas such as oxygen therapy, inhalation
therapies, sleep apnea treatment and negative pressure wound therapy.
Headquartered in Lake Forest, California, Apria owns and operates more than
400 locations throughout the United States and serves more than 1.2 million
patients each year.
“We’re now able to deliver
outstanding healthcare to
more people than ever.”
Jim Slagle
Senior Director of Business Intelligence and
Data Analytics
Apria Healthcare
Share this
Identifying reporting
challenges
Building an
analytics solution
In the U.S. healthcare industry, an
increasingly stringent regulatory
environment and intensifying competition
are placing downward pressure on
margins. For specialist healthcare
companies such as Apria Healthcare—a
leading provider of home respiratory
services and medical equipment based
in Lake Forest, California—the challenge
is to offer patients the highest-quality
services at the best possible price.
Apria decided to build a centralized
approach to forecasting, and looked
for an enterprise-class solution. After
reviewing analytics solutions from
a number of vendors, the company
selected IBM® Cognos® TM1®
on Cloud.
Jim Slagle, Senior Director of Business
Intelligence and Data Analytics at Apria
Healthcare, explains: “To continue to grow
the business and reach new customers,
we need to invest in strategic initiatives,
such as opening new business units and
building more competitive pricing models
for our services. But which of these
initiatives have the greatest potential to
increase efficiencies and control costs?
“Without a doubt, our partnership
with the expert team of consultants
from Aviana was a key factor in
the success of the project.”
Jim Slagle, Senior Director of Business
Intelligence and Data Analytics,
Apria Healthcare
Jim Slagle recalls: “To demonstrate to
the business that we were making the
right decision, my team worked with key
members of the finance function to run
a proof of concept exercise—and the
results were very positive. We presented
the results to our Chief Financial Officer,
who is a very progressive leader. She
immediately realized the potential
business value of the solution.”
“Because we operate across the whole
of the U.S., we gather a lot of data about
the market for our specialist products.
We knew this data could help us see
opportunities quicker and gain a more
holistic view of the market than some of
our smaller competitors. To help us focus
on the most promising opportunities,
we first needed to understand the true
cost of our operations—a considerable
challenge for a healthcare organization of
our size.”
Jim Slagle continues: “In the past,
we relied on spreadsheets to capture
our profit and loss data and forecast
performance. Because different parts of
the business used different spreadsheets,
it was difficult to ensure that we were
capturing and using our data in a
consistent, accurate way. As a result,
analyzing costs took a lot of time, and
we couldn’t be 100 percent confident in
the results.
2
Working together with a team from
IBM Premier Business Partner Aviana,
Apria Healthcare built a secure budgeting
and forecasting environment for its
distribution business. By deploying the
solution in the cloud, the finance team
gains the flexibility to scale its analytics
environment to meet immediate business
needs, while reducing its dependence on
internal IT support.
Jim Slagle comments: “The bulk of the
data that we use to build our financial
plans comes directly from personnel
at our 370 locations. These are the
people who will ultimately consume the
forecasts that we generate, so gaining
their trust in the solution was crucial.
Cloud deployment allowed us to sidestep
many of the traditional on-premises
hardware issues, and focus 100 percent
on developing a solution that would give
our users exactly what they need.”
“For example, it was previously a
significant challenge to gain even a
relatively simple measure such as average
revenue per employee—today, that insight
is just a mouse-click away. After we have
finished building the strong foundation of
our budgeting and forecasting functions,
the next step will be to fold in more
advanced analyses.”
Understand
costs, increase
competiveness
He adds: “In fact, user adoption has been
tremendous. After just a few weeks, we
were using distributed reporting in the
field with extremely positive feedback
from our business users.
“Without a doubt, our partnership
with the expert team of consultants
from Aviana was a key factor in the
success of the project. Throughout the
process, Aviana worked side-by-side
with us to ensure that our migration
to IBM Cognos TM1 on Cloud went
smoothly, and the team was always on
hand to provide guidance and support
when we needed it.”
Accurate data,
trusted reports
“We have eliminated virtually all of the
data quality and trust issues that were
raised by our old spreadsheet-based
processes,” says Jim Slagle. “We use
a single, centralized analytics engine to
process our financial data in a repeatable
and consistent way. Crucially, improving
the quality of our data is helping us to
gain a clearer picture of the true state of
our operations.
Apria Healthcare is now able to deliver
accurate budgets, forecasts and reports
to a broad audience of stakeholders
quickly and effectively.
3
Jim Slagle continues: “In the past, we
spent so much time and devoted so
many resources to bringing our budget
together that there was very little time
to analyze the figures ahead of crucial
board meetings. Thanks to TM1, that is
all going to change. As well as drilling
down into our data to identify variance
between our forecasts and actuals
to drive cost-efficiencies, we aim to
align our sales goals directly with our
planning process.
“By gaining a complete understanding
of all of the cost drivers for each of our
products—including specialist labor,
medical equipment and logistics—we
will have the ability to create centralized
pricing models across the entire
business. This could be an extremely
valuable source of competitive advantage,
as it would potentially enable us to better
use our economies of scale to deliver
the same high-quality care services at a
significantly lower price.”
Ready for the future
Solution components
•IBM® Cognos® TM1® on Cloud
After taking the first steps on its
analytics journey, Apria Healthcare is
already looking to the future. Jim Slagle
concludes: “One of the biggest benefits
of cloud-based analytics is flexibility:
we are not locked into any of the data
modeling choices that we are making
now, and we can adapt the solution as
our needs change. If you do analytics
right, it really can transform your business.
I am confident that the insights we obtain
are going to help us to bring outstanding
products and services to more people
than ever before.”
About Aviana
Since 1994, Aviana has built a solid reputation
as a preferred custom solutions and consulting
partner for clients in healthcare, entertainment,
finance, insurance, retail, hospitality and
gaming, and manufacturing. Over the years,
Aviana has empowered its customers with
increased control and flexibility through a
variety of best-in-class predictive analytics
and performance management solutions
and strategies. As a result, it is now one of
the fastest-growing IT consulting companies
in Southern California. To learn more about
services and solutions from Aviana, please visit
avianaglobal.com
About IBM Analytics
IBM Analytics offers one of the world’s deepest
and broadest analytics platform, domain and
industry solutions that deliver new value to
businesses, governments and individuals. For
more information about how IBM Analytics
helps to transform industries and professions
with data, visit ibm.com/analytics. Follow us
on Twitter at @IBMAnalytics, on our blog at
ibmbigdatahub.com and join the conversation
#IBMAnalytics.
Connect with us
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2015, IBM Corporation, 1 New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America, December 2015.
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Cognos, and TM1 are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of
IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/us/en/copytrade.shtml.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The performance data and client
examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT
IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY
WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.
Please Recycle
YTC04055-USEN-00