MedVet Cuts their Budgeting Process by 10 Days While Growing 3x.

About MedVet

MedVet’s mission is to provide compassionate and in-depth care for companion animals.

• Industry: Healthcare
• Company Size: 2800 employees
• Location: Columbus, Ohio

“I think success, a lot of times, is also based on accuracy of the data. Should the CEO be looking for something, I would say I'm successful if she knows where she can go and find an accurate and timely number when she needs it.”

SARAH O’CONNOR, VP of Finance, MedVet

Gaining Accuracy & Time for Analysis

MedVet was always on the lookout for new perspectives on their numbers, but lacked the detail to run the analysis they wanted.“ When I started, we did very high-level quarterly forecasts. They weren't as collaborative as we like to be and really didn't dive down into the department and account-level detail that we really liked doing,” said Sarah.

Trying to manage annual budgets in Excel meant a lot of emails back and forth, trying to trace where and when changes were made. It would take hours to update budgets when data entry issues were found.

Rolling everything up to a consolidated view of the hospitals took a lot of time and effort with Excel. If a hospital director added a new row without Sarah’s knowledge, it would impact the master worksheet and create difficulty to consolidate it and lead to potential inaccuracy of their information. Every hour spent on review meant even less time for analysis.

Using Limelight, MedVet has gained access to account-level details which has helped them perform better analysis and set up metrics for different sized hospitals. For large hospitals, they can leverage number of team members as a metric. For example, If one hospital has a very high payroll, they can easily compare it to other similarly sized hospitals to decide on the best course of action to improve and maximize their efficiency.

Self-Service Reporting Enables Greater Perspective on their Data

Being able to quickly build out templates and reports the way MedVet wanted was tantamount to the team’s success. Sarah’s team can easily create a report in Limelight and use it immediately for analysis. The ability to adjust is important, as MedVet often wanted to see data in different ways. “I always like coming up with different views of our inputs and being able to see another story if you look at it from different perspectives,” said Sarah. “I think you need the time to be able to create those. And I definitely didn't have that.”

Limelight has provided them the ability to slice and dice their numbers by department and instantly see which ones rank at the top of the organization in revenue. Departments such as ER, surgery and internal medicine are the largest drivers of their business and being able to incorporate those drivers in Limelight allowed them to analyze which opportunities made the most sense. “Especially when talking about not only revenue but contributing to the bottom line—things like cardiology, radiology—are those areas that we could actually grow more and make them a larger percent of the total pie,” said Sarah.

Having a single source of truth and the right data at hand improved data intelligence for Sarah and the company. One of the features MedVet raves about is Limelight’s Audit Trail - being able to track changes to their budgets, forecasts and reports, and revert back to historical changes has given them greater visibility and enhanced planning. “Sometimes people don't want to spend the time typing out what they're thinking. But 6 months later, they'll forget why they did something a certain way,” said Sarah. In Excel, she had no visibility to any edits or history of changes. Obtaining this capability has saved their FP&A team a tremendous amount of time and increased collaboration across their team and departments.

Key Decisions Made Faster and with Greater Confidence

Limelight’s ease of use led to widespread user adoption across the organization: from hospital directors, to new leaders, and to the CEO.“I think success, a lot of times, is also based on accuracy of the data. Should the CEO be looking for something, I would say I'm successful if she knows where she can go and find an accurate and timely number when she needs it.” said Sarah. MedVet’s CEO, and the entire team, can now look in Limelight for accurate and timely information whenever they need it. They trust Limelight to provide a data-backed overview of their operations.

Navigating COVID-19 with Monthly Forecasts. During the pandemic, MedVet needed to transition to monthly forecasts and provide continuous updates on the company’s performance. Without Limelight, Sarah says they likely would not have been able to execute on creating the reports that were needed for key decisions. “I think hands down, having Limelight during that time was key to the immediate change we needed,” said Sarah.