Learn how replacing Peachtree with Business Central helped West Dermatology to look forward and make better strategic decisions.

Customer
West Dermatology

Industry
Healthcare

Country
United States

May, 2021

During the last four years, West Dermatology doubled its size jumping from managing 30 clinics to now close to 70. As a network of Healthcare Professionals who specialize in dermatology practices, West Dermatology was finding it difficult to manage a growing number of entities with Peachtree. In order to reduce accounting mistakes, gain control over their finance management, and support their exponential growth, Microsoft Gold Partner, Technology Management Concepts recommended replacing their existing financial software. West Dermatology replaced Peachtree, with the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Microsoft dynamics 365 Business Central. By migrating to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, West Dermatology embraced more effective consolidated reporting and cut 46 man-hours every single month.

“My team has gotten much more efficient, and it just freed up their time to get to the next level”

– Julie Nguyen, Senior Director of Finance & Controller at West Dermatology.

How Dynamics 365 Business Central Helped Streamline Their Closing Process and Support West Dermatology’s Rapid Growth.

West Dermatology is a network of Healthcare Professionals managing a growing number of clinics specialized in the dermatology practices. Located throughout California, Arizona, and Nevada, West Dermatology has spent the past few year growing by affiliating more Professional Corporations (PCs) under their brand. These professional corporations are owned by healthcare experts and professionals and generally include a certain number of clinics.

In 2014, Western dermatology expanded and created Western Holdings. This management company is the result of an affiliation with Dr. Blanchard’s Professional Corporation, a PC that had over 40 years of activities and a large number of locations. It is now responsible for the business aspect of the organization which includes marketing efforts and strategies, human resource, accounting activities and other business-related functions.

Since the creation of Western Holdings, the company continues to grow adding four more professional corporations and doubling the size of their business. West Dermatology’s Senior Director of Finance & Controller, Julie Nguyen confirmed that “[West Derm] exploded massively! We went from managing about 30 clinics to now close to 70 clinics”. Considering their new rapid grow and the rate at which they grew, it came as no surprise that West Dermatology needed to modernize their system. With so many new clinics, it was now essential to improve transparency, traceability, streamlining, and “actually analyze data instead of just digging” says Julie.

“The same team is doing twice as much work with twice as many transactions with all these clinics now coming and integrating into our system” – Julie Nguyen, Senior Director of Finance & Controller at West Dermatology.

Looking Beyond The Capabilities of Peachtree

As West Dermatology continued to demonstrate incredible growth after the affiliation of Dr. Blanchard’s PC in 2014, they developed a need for a system that could accommodate their increasing revenue and accounting needs. Peachtree, the financial software they previously used, was limited in its capabilities and made necessary business functions difficult. Julie emphasized that “Peachtree is more a bookkeeping system than an actual ERP system, there is no inner company transactions, we need to physically log in and out of each company… and consolidate everything through Excel”

Leadership at West Dermatology recognized the need for a more robust and comprehensive solution. They needed a system with multi-entities management capabilities that would continue to grow and evolve with their company to support functionalities as they added more professional corporations. For Julie, “this biggest issue was consolidating, meaning whenever I had to run reports out of all 21 companies, I had to kick everybody out so there would be downtime where the team just couldn’t get into the system”.

An Undisputed Decision to Switch to Business Central

West Dermatology spent a great deal of time and energy evaluating multiple ERP solutions, including:

• Dynamics GP,
• NetSuite,
• Sage,
• Dynamics 365 BC

The majority of their Request for Proposals (RFP) came back recommending Dynamics 365 Business Central. “It makes things very easy when different people recognize unanimously that Dynamics 365 Business Central is the right solution for us. Now it comes down to deciding on which consultants to go through.” says Julie.

West Dermatology turned to Microsoft Gold Partner Technology Management Concepts (TMC) to begin their Digital Transformation. For Julie, “TMC were our star, we all felt good about their teams and the level of commitment that the TMC was going to give us.”

Based on West Dermatology’s company structure, TMC recommended Dynamics 365 Business Central. From here, everything revolved around providing the right amount of customer service to make sure to meet the short deadline and the availability requested for this type of project.

Improving Control, Traceability, and Visibility with Business Central

West Dermatology was up against a challenging task as it became a necessity to manage multi-entities within the same ecosystem. This complex situation requires unique solutions, one of which, is the ability to generate analysis and reporting at both the management and clinical level. Unlike most companies, which only require a single set of financial information, West Dermatology has to produce and maintain information for each professional corporation. Of course, this makes their situation much more complex.

The capabilities of West Dermatology have expanded with the implement of their new ERP. With the application of Dynamics 365 Business Central and the use of Dimensions, West Dermatology is now capable of tracing added and deleted entries, as well as control users’ permissions. Research information and data are available in a single location and do not require additional signoffs when leadership or management need to view reports and other data withing the system.

Now, West Dermatology has full control over their system. Julie agrees that the system has been an incredible asset to the company, stating, “it decreased the closing process time by three, and gives my team the capability to look for answer and to be more of a reviewer than a digger” says Julie.

“My team has gotten much more efficient, and it just freed up their time to get to the next level” – Julie Nguyen, Senior Director of Finance & Controller at West Dermatology.

After the new system was implemented and the staff properly trained, West Dermatology noticed immediate changes to their productivity, processes, and daily tasks. No longer did they have to rely on an inner-company journal to record the company’s transaction and reconciliation process.

Julie’s team was able to successfully cut their labor costs by eliminating 46-man hours each month, this helped to reduce the company’s closing period to just 10 days! Empowered by the new capabilities available, her whole team was able to get “to the next level”.

Now, they can be more analytical and leverage real-time data to drive the company financially and make better business decisions.

“Now that we are used to Business Central, I can literally ask my team a question and within a couple of minutes they can tell me what it is because it’s so much faster to get into and everything is just quicker to reach.” – Julie Nguyen, Senior Director of Finance & Controller at West Dermatology.

“I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, I have done three new ERP implementations & migrations in my career, and hands down, TMC is the most interactive, the most responsive implementation team I have ever worked with.” – Julie Nguyen, Senior Director of Finance & Controller at West Dermatology.