Gardant Management Solutions Solver Customer Case Study

Speaker: Nicole Cecich, Senior Director of Financial Accounting, Gardant Management Solutions

Nicole Cecich: We have integrated Sage Intacct, which is our ERP software. We have that as a nightly integration. We also use data from Paycom, though it's not directly integrated, we have a someone on our team that uploads data after a payroll, as well as some other internal data that we use.

Nicole Cecich: Our company is in the assisted living industry, so we manage different communities in various states that offer Medicaid and private pay. Each community has its own set of books, payroll, etc. So, Solver is very useful to combine those various books.

Nicole Cecich: Each of the communities that we manage has its own set of books. So we wanted to be able to have a software that would allow us the capability to create reporting where we could see how all of these communities compared to each other, as well as provide combined reporting for ownership that is similar among several communities. Solver helps us with this issue. We also wanted to have one place where budgeting would be housed, so we could also compare those items, and be able to go to one place to see those soft those budget items. Prior, we budgeted via Excel, and there was a lot of manual issues that could occur with those.

Nicole Cecich: Solver has been great so far, I feel like our capability to create reports and produce those reports to benefit the whole entire company operations, the various executive directors at the communities has been outstanding. We've heard nothing but praise for the reports that we provide. I believe we are limited just due to our knowledge of Solver thus far. We've been a growing company, so we've also had people newly joined the team that were training on Solver, and I think having some of our team go to the conference this year will help us learn how we can use Solver better and make our reporting and that even better.

Nicole Cecich: The main reason for us going with Solver was to help solve for a budgeting issue that we had. We were doing budgeting very manually prior in Excel, and any changes had to be done by opening an Excel file for every single community and updating it and saving it back. There were also issues where someone could make a manual adjustment or change to a budget, and it could throw it all off. By having it in Solver, we have control over it. We can make adjustments one time that'll impact all budgets. We're also able to pull information and compare it, just the ability to create a report one time and be able to pull that for multiple months showing the same data set has greatly approved efficiencies. We've also been able to create reports for ownership groups that we've heard nothing but praise about. So the efficiencies and timing of these reports has greatly helped us.

Nicole Cecich: We've made our individual reports that benefit our company or what our company needs at the time, the budgets are customized to how we budget present items, etc. But we haven't made any Solver customizations I don't believe. But the templates are unique to our company and what our needs are.

Nicole Cecich: Solver is used explicitly for the analysis team, but we are able to pull various reports that greatly helps our operations. There's different aspects they look at for different points of time and they like to be able to see, especially trailing 12 for all communities that have different books in our accounting software. We can pull a report and give it to them. There's other aspects they like to compare. We've compared various budgets to each other that have the same ownership group, so we can understand what questions they may have of what, why one community would be outperforming another. The analysis team is who has access to Solver right now. However, we are pulling data for the various departments at Gardant, especially operations. The collaboration between the analysis team and operations is very collaborative. We work together constantly to make things better at not only the communities, but at Gardant as well. We love that we are able to create a report that will be used. And once that report is saved and published, that others can have access to that report within the analysis to pull it and run it. And that it's as simple as next month, hitting that run, exporting it to Excel and sending it out. We don't have to recreate the report month after month end. That is an efficiency itself. We have several reports that we pull for our C-suite that we've attuned over time. And now, people have the ability to run it, pull it, and send it out to high up individuals that let them see how the communities and our company is doing, and they appreciate this snapshot that we're able to complete.

Nicole Cecich: Right now, we're using Solver just for budgeting and for some portfolio-wide reports. We believe and want to definitely expand Solver's use for forecasting, doing multiple budget versions, etc. The reason we not have not gone into that is we've just grown as a company, so we've been onboarding new members on how to use Solver the way we currently use it, but we're hoping as our team grows and we get more stable and we're able to attend these conferences now that we can expand or use to Solver to these needs that we think our owners and company have that we're not fulfilling.

Nicole Cecich: The benefits that we've received from using Solver has been significant. There are many efficiencies that are handled just by everything being in one place in time, being able to create a report once and running it. Prior, we would have had to recreate that report time and time again or export multiple files to create one report. So being able to have it all in one has saved numerous hours. There's also been the risk reduction, just how only certain people have the capability to touch these formulas, change these formulas, and things like that. The data being housed all in one area is also greatly benefited us. I've heard nothing but wonderful things about Solver from outside of our company, people that are within our company, but outside the analysis team that don't even use it. They know what we're able to do with it and rave about it. So I find that very a very wonderful thing.

Nicole Cecich: Our trainer for Solver, John Stravos was excellent. I can't say anything better about him. He was always available to help us. We actually transitioned to using Solver right at the beginning of COVID. So, we were all managing working from home, that balance, trying to figure out Solver, and John was always happy to hop on a call with us, look at what we had issues with, on his own time and get back to us. We had tremendous support from him so we could get it working and where we need to be at. As far as the implementation, I wasn't a part of the linking of it or getting data in there from our existing software. Another member of our team coordinated those efforts. I think there were parts of it we probably could have done a little better. I know he kinda worked on its solely again. I think just with the timing of it being COVID and working from home, etc. there are some things that might have been lost. I know we're trying to correct some of those things now as we're getting more familiar with Solver and what we want in our software. I think for other organizations really thinking about how you're gonna use it and not just at this point in time, how you're gonna use it in the future will help you plan, how you want it to be input into your data warehouse, what you want to use it for, etc. thinking that future planning will help as well. But overall, the training of it and everything went wonderfully.