Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Updating ERP

Despite a number of unexpected challenges, Accenture met the original go-live date; Dana-Farber is now positioned to continue its pursuit of high performance.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, is New England's pre-eminent cancer care provider. It is ranked fourth in the United States in delivering expert, compassionate care to children and adults with cancer, AIDS and related diseases. The Institute, which employs about 3,000 people, supports more than 150,000 patient visits a year. It also conducts basic research into the mechanisms of diseases and translates these findings into effective treatments.

In its efforts to become a high-performance business, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has focused on blending research and clinical excellence.

This innovative combination, which has earned international acclaim, positions the Institute to bring novel therapies from the laboratory into clinical use. Despite its successful and highly innovative collaborative model, the interdisciplinary combination of clinicians and researchers—with varying work methods and financial management needs—presented a challenge when it came time to implement an integrated application suite for enterprise resource planning (ERP). The Institute needed to replace its highly customized ERP system, which had been in place for 14 years, with one that would better help the organization advance its efforts to achieve high performance. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute chose Accenture to help implement the PeopleSoft ERP suite across the Institute's multifaceted organization.

Fully aligned to assist Dana-Farber with a successful ERP implementation, the Accenture team became integrated with Dana-Farber's staff almost as a new department within the organization.

Accenture oversaw the PeopleSoft implementation in two phases.

• Phase 1 involved installing PeopleSoft's modules for HR, benefits administration, time and labor, and payroll.
  
  
• In Phase 2, the team added modules for managing the supply chain, and for handling financials and grants.

In total, the functional scope of the project included the implementation of 14 PeopleSoft modules, including eProcurement, Purchasing, Inventory, Receiving, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Asset Management, Project Accounting, Billing (non-patient), Receivables (non-patient), Grants, Contracts, Commitment Control and PeopleSoft Portal, which served as the starting point for an enterprise-wide portal to access all system functionality over the Institute's intranet.

With Accenture's help, the Institute met its original go-live commitment date with full functionality—a remarkable accomplishment considering the combination of challenges that had to be overcome, including two very different constituencies, software modules that were being implemented while still under development, and a virus attack on Dana-Farber's servers.

The Dana-Farber/Accenture implementation project was ranked internally as one of the top 20 health care IT projects in the Northeast, and the client's level of satisfaction with Accenture's performance rates 4.5 (better than excellent) on a 5-point scale.

According to Dorothy Puhy, Dana-Farber's executive vice president and CFO, "If there's one big factor that made it work, it was that they all were able to work together so efficiently. I think up and down the line, people on the team from the Dana-Farber side and the people on the team from the Accenture side formed effective partnerships. They learned from each other, respected each other. People worked extraordinarily well together on all levels."

The work described in this document was previously performed by professionals who were part of a company that Accenture acquired in 2005.