Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia, LifeNet Health is a leading biomedical alloengineering organization and organ and tissue donation agency. Since 1995, more than 1.5 million allografts have been distributed with a 100-percent safety record.

LifeNet Health employees embody the values of the organization itself: they want to improve the quality of life for people who face challenging health issues, and they serve the families of both donors and recipients with compassion. Executive Vice President Doug Wilson joined LifeNet Health because he was fascinated by the good that the organization can do for people: "the ability to turn tragedy into triumph." Robin Cowherd, Director of Donor Family Services, had similar motives. He turned his volunteer experience counseling families in crisis through the Stephens Ministry into LifeNet Health's comprehensive bereavement support program for families of organ and tissue donors.

"What we do at LifeNet Health is high technology with high touch," says Wilson. The term "high touch" refers to putting in extra effort by being in frequent contact with people and engaging them in ways that qualify as special treatment. "While I am responsible for business development, I never forget that we work for the benefit of the patient. Everything we do comes from a donated gift from a person who is deceased. It's a compelling story that keeps you motivated."

Frederic Peycelon, Senior Director of Marketing, adds, "We are very mission-driven. Being a not-for-profit organization restricts our ability to raise money, so we have to be disciplined about profit and margins. In a sense, our funding comes from ourselves, through the efficiency of our operations."

However, LifeNet Health's disparate, aging IT environment did not support efficient operations because it forced employees to switch from one system to another to accomplish everyday tasks. LifeNet Health had different software solutions for finance, sales order entry, and distribution. "We needed to find a business management solution that would consolidate these systems," says Wilson.

In the client services department, Cardio Vascular Account Coordinator Dominic Hamlett takes orders from long-term customers whose telephone numbers he knows "like the back of my hand." If a customer wanted to verify pricing on an allograft but only had the invoice number, Hamlett would have to call accounting to get the answer because his sales order entry system only referenced allografts by order tracking numbers. "This could waste a couple of minutes or a couple of hours," he says. "If a surgeon wanted to know what blood group the donor belonged to, I'd have to search another database for that information. It reduced the level of customer service I could provide."

Jeanne Sheeley, Accounting Supervisor, worried about data integrity. "It was easy to duplicate credits to customers because the sales-order entry system assigned a tracking number and the accounting system assigned a different invoice number to the same allograft. Handling credits and returns was a pain, because our sales-order entry system didn't recognize a manual credit as such, and we had to manually go through and verify every single credit."

When it came to reporting, LifeNet Health staff wasted time manually gathering and combining information from multiple systems. Easy access to information is important for tracking the 250,000 allografts LifeNet Health distributes annually. "We have to maintain correct temperature and storage conditions and follow Federal Drug Administration inventory tracking requirements," says Matt Dodge, Director of Logistics. "We have to know right down to the individual serial number the entire transaction history of each graft. Microsoft Dynamics GP integrates with the tracking software that we use for shipping so that customer service can easily access that information."

LifeNet Health's executives wanted to provide better technology tools to improve access to information, streamline processes, and foster individual productivity. They reasoned that it would be too difficult to upgrade the heavily customized sales order system, and that an upgrade would not solve the compatibility issue with the financial solution. "We needed a single business management solution to integrate both functions—one that had the scalability and functionality we needed to carry us forward," says Peycelon.

LifeNet Health IT staffers worked with technology partner BroadPoint Technologies to find a solution. LifeNet Health had been using Microsoft Business Solutions—Great Plains version 6.0 for accounting and purchasing. Together with BroadPoint Technologies, they upgraded that system to Microsoft Dynamics GP version 9.0.

LifeNet Health used the new system to combine its original Microsoft software-based financial solution with the order entry and distribution systems, which consolidated data from all of those systems into one, eliminating the need to search multiple data silos for allograft inventory information. Today, LifeNet Health employees use the new solution to better manage finance, order processing, and inventory. The new solution assigns a single ID number for each order and integrates the accounting and order entry process so that Sheeley no longer has to worry about data integrity.

Employees at LifeNet Health now have more flexible reporting and analysis tools. Dodge is taking advantage of the new solution's Smart Lists, a query tool he's using for locating and exporting inventory data to spreadsheet software for easier analysis.

"This new system provides significant improvements over the previous finance, order entry, and distribution systems," says Wilson. "At LifeNet Health, everything we do respects the donation, so when we can improve how efficiently we manage each donated gift, it's an opportunity to make good on our mission to save lives and restore health."

Today, employees at LifeNet Health are performing key processes using a single solution for finance, sales, and distribution.

"The essence of a well-oiled organization is the smooth flow of information and streamlined business processes, and that's what our Microsoft business management software provides," says Wilson. "Now that we have the same way of naming and tracking inventory within one system, it's easier to share information between the accounting and customer service departments. When it comes to monitoring inventory and integrating our order entry and financial departments, this solution has greatly enhanced our abilities."

Employees using the new business management solution at LifeNet Health are taking advantage of improved reporting capabilities and a single source of up-to-date information to gain a better understanding of the business. Using the more flexible reporting tool, Peycelon can better track the efficacy of sales representatives and business partners by assigning more than one territory to each hospital client, a capability he didn't have before. Sheeley can now analyze her receivables to learn more about purchase order problems on invoices and customers' paying habits to improve cash flow and collections. "It used to take me 15 minutes to calculate the day's outstanding sales, but now I click a button and it's done in less than 10 seconds," she says.

"Moving to [Microsoft] Dynamics GP combined finance, sales, and distribution on one system, so we could have better information flow and reporting from the same data source," says Dodge. "This way we can all work together to improve our understanding of the business using the same data. I use the Smart List and the ability to add fields to my queries to gain a much better understanding of our inventory. Now I'm tracking why grafts are returned, how many are on hold, and their credit statuses."

Peycelon is impressed with the way the new business solution automates the approval of returns and credits. "For some procedures, like spinal surgery, the surgeon doesn't know until he has the patient on the operating table exactly what size of bio implant he will need. So we send a variety of sizes, and he returns the ones he doesn't use," explains Peycelon. "This is a marketing advantage for us, but it used to be big headache for customer service representatives to manually approve every credit once the unused allografts had been returned and deemed intact. Today, the approval is automatically processed, saving at least 25 percent of one customer service rep's time."

In the customer service department, Hamlett can quickly answer his customers' questions because he no longer has to search through different databases for information. "I can provide better service over the phone because I can see the size of the graft, its price and availability, and the blood type and cause of death of the donor. I have all the information I need at my fingertips."

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