How Caring Homes moved away from the constraints of spread sheets by upgrading to Planning Analytics.

IBM Business Analytics Solution – IBM Planning Analytics

Services – Consultancy

Caring Homes Group is one of the most highly respected care and support providers with a network of care facilities across the UK, providing residential, nursing, palliative and dementia care for in excess of 3,800 residents. They proudly remain family-run and have grown to own and manage more than 65 ‘Caring Homes.’

What challenges were Caring Homes facing?

Due to rapid expansion Caring Homes wanted to move away from spread sheet based approach to their financial processes. They needed a new financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting solution that could give them the speed and flexibility their growing business demanded. They wanted three things from their new solution:

Consistency and accuracy in monthly reporting
The ability to incorporate their payroll system
The capability to spot patterns and trends in their occupancy categories.

Results

After Planning Analytics was successfully installed the next step was to arrange some induction days explaining the important concepts at its core.

After a carefully programmed schedule of hands-on and hands-off tutoring, the Caring Homes team were confidently working on the system independently and getting to grips with the capabilities of the software.

The increased flexibility they now have has meant huge time savings and better budgeting accuracy. They are able to get monthly accounts out in 20 minutes where previously it would have taken 2 to 3 hours.

The outcome for Caring Homes has been that they have a much better understanding of their business and are able to pull down rich, multi-dimensional data quickly and efficiently.