CASE NO. 99
Integration and optimisation after several acquisitions
INITIAL SITUATION
A leading European hospital chain had grown by acquisitions to a more than one billion Euro business over several years. The holding now wanted to exploit saving potentials by bundling respectively centralising functions and competencies. A systematic benchmarking of the portfolio of hospitals and nursing homes was to be conducted for this purpose.
CHALLENGE
The group was very professional and successful in its transactions, yet it had not been determined to the integration of the acquired hospitals. A unified management of the hospitals was missing to be able to exploit the synergies. Owing to their diversity and specialisation the facilities were not readily comparable and their strategic potential unaddressed. The commitment to high quality at acceptable cost was not implemented group-wide, but pursued only individually on local level.
SOLUTION
Jointly with the top management of the holding and the hospitals twelve operational and two strategic projects were identified and launched. Major themes were the centralisation of administrative functions in shared services, group-wide bundling and tender of important secondary services, benchmarking and optimisation of support processes, i.e. documentation, coding, invoicing, patient management and resource planning. The project teams defined, quantified and aligned all individual measures and translated their effects into the finance plan to be evident and controllable.
RESULT
The operational projects were validated and optimised in pilot hospitals. The synergy potential for the group was a middle double-digit million figure. The company was successful in continuing with the operational and the strategic projects on its own.
