54. Prophix & Wesley Life- Revolutionizing Financial Planning and Reporting in Senior Living Communities

In this episode, Amber Bardon welcomes John Sabec, Partner Account Manager at Prophix, and Lincoln Grimes, Finance Manager at WesleyLife.  John provides insights into Prophix's history and its focus on solving Excel-related challenges & Lincoln talks about the necessity for efficient budgeting and planning tools.

Listen to hear examples of Prophix's impact on WesleyLife's operations, which includes improved access to real-time financial data.  Prophix has versatile features, such as user-friendly design and extensive integration capabilities. Additionally,  catch a glimpse into Prophix's future developments, including AI-driven features, by listening to the full episode.

Learn more about Prophix on their website.
John Sabec: jsabec@prophix.com

Learn more about WesleyLife on their website. 

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Transcript

Amber Bardon: Welcome to Raising Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon. Today's episode is one that I've been looking forward to for a very long time. Ever since I was first introduced to Prophix, I've been waiting to get them on the podcast. 

 we have two guests. We have John Sabec, who is the partner account manager at Prophix, and we also have Lincoln Grimes, who is the finance manager at Wesley Life. 

Welcome to the show.

Lincoln Grimes: Hello. Thanks.

Amber Bardon: Lincoln,

Can you tell our listeners about your role and about the community that you're at and just give us a little bit of background about yourself?

Lincoln Grimes: Yeah, so my role is finance manager and predominantly in the planning and forecasting part of the organization. We have about 11 communities for healthy living. In addition to outside of that, some home and community based services. So meeting a lot of need in the community and my job there is to help us optimize our planning [00:01:00] tools and budgeting and planning and financial reporting.

Amber Bardon: Fabulous. And we're going to learn all about that today. John, do you want to give us an intro and background about yourself as well? 

John Sabec: Yeah, sure. So John Sabec here. I'm one of the partner account managers here at Prophix. Been with the organization for about close to 10 years. Worn a couple of different hats while I've been here.

I used to be a solution engineer, so I was responsible for running product demonstrations and building out various types of proof of concepts. By trade, I'm actually a CPA. Prior to joining Prophix, I worked for a large telco as an FP& A manager. And then before that. Was in public and internal audit as well.

So very familiar with everything related to budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidations, aggregations, and all the pains and headaches that coincide with that. 

Amber Bardon: So when I first learned about Prophix and we had an initial demo, I was really excited about the capabilities because I think the solution that you're bringing to the industry has been really long overdue.

So john, let's start off with you just describing a little bit more about the company and the problems that you're looking to solve. 

John Sabec: We were established [00:02:00] in 1987. We're headquartered here out of Toronto, Canada. However, we do have offices globally.

In addition to that, we actually work with an exclusive partner network that also resolves and implements Prophix. And really the challenges that we try to solve is everything that relates to planning, reporting, consolidating and forecasting in the Excel environment. So we hope organizations move off of Excel into a robust what we call corporate performance management or CPM platform.

Also commonly referred to as FPM once in a while. But within the application, there's a lot of automations. In terms of being able to integrate directly into source systems, this could be ERP systems, EMR systems, CRM system, payroll systems, in order to go ahead and bring all that data into one central location where it could then be surfaced in easy to use dashboards.

And keep in mind, this could be financial or clinical data. You can leverage it for planning, forecasting, and reporting as well.

Amber Bardon: Thanks for that background. So Lincoln, tell me, how did you hear about Prophix and how are you using [00:03:00] it at 

Wesley 

Life. 

Lincoln Grimes: Sure. So I've been working with CPMs for about 5 or 6 years.

And when I came to Wesley Live we worked internally to move to a CPM given some of the systems that we were using. They were kind of risk filled. Some of those budgeting and planning software tools native in Excel can be really difficult to consolidate, can be really difficult to manage the results of the calculations.

And so that is essentially what we're doing at Wesley Life is bringing all of that information into the CPM to be able to scale, be more efficient, add users in, bring users into that environment and get close to the source of the information so that they can be informed by those end unit results and so that's primarily what we're doing today at Wesley Life more system operation and integration to come there for us as well. 

Amber Bardon: Do you mind sharing [00:04:00] which systems you've been able to connect and what kind of data are you able to get out that you didn't have access to before?

Lincoln Grimes: Right now, it's primarily our ledger system that is integrated with it, so we are still looking to the EMR integration, our payroll and ledger information. We do have a disparate CRM too, so those are next on with us. So primarily what we're integrating and what we've been able to do, I'll give you a good example of this.

So we bring in our financials each night on a schedule that Prophix helps us automate and makes it real easy to do this on demand. So every night or every morning, although the leads within our communities are able to get on and see the latest impacts to the ledger as they're trying to work with performance there before we had that with Prophix, our leads might get that information about [00:05:00] once a month, 3 days after close and a little bit too late.

So it was really difficult for us to manage preliminary closing and a number of things like that. So that's a good example of the door that it's open for us and shown a lot of promise. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, that is really key. go on site to a lot of communities and that is an issue I hear everywhere I go is that access to the financial data that you need to make decisions just comes too late

to be useful to you. So I think that's such a great solution that Prophix has been able to solve. John, can you talk a little bit about did Prophix decide to get into the senior living side and where do you see Prophix can have the biggest impact in that industry specifically? 

John Sabec: From a product standpoint Prophix is industry agnostic.

But what we realized very early on is a lot of senior living communities are doing all of their planning and reporting in Excel. To Lincoln's point, that process tends to lend itself to being very manual in nature, time consuming. There's different source [00:06:00] systems where data needs to be pulled from, aggregated, and then reported on.

 Excel is a great tool. However, it's not a database. What we tend to find is that organizations will leverage it. They'll add that information. And over time, those workbooks become rather large and they're always susceptible to being error prone, right? And from a decision making standpoint, if key stakeholders need to go ahead and make decisions, you want to make sure that the information is relevant, timely and accurate, right?

John Sabec: So we'd like to see by being able to go ahead and integrate directly into the key source systems for an organization and being able to go ahead and pull that information on that schedule cadence, they're able to be proactive rather than reactive. Users can have nice, easy to use dashboards that are set up that are fully interactive or once again, you could track financial information.

You could track clinical residential data all within one central location to really give you that holistic view of how the businesses is doing. 

Amber Bardon: This has just been lacking for so long with the types of systems that are out there [00:07:00] that there really hasn't been great ways to get this data in real time.

Lincoln. Do you have any examples of types of decisions that you were able to make using the data from Prophix that maybe wouldn't have been able to do in the past? 

Lincoln Grimes: The easy, obvious ones might be managing our food expense, which can be rather large. So it helps us understand the tracking and progress of that along with our procurement system as well that it helps us monitor and control instead of the look back what happened and hey, if we were over under, it gives us a better ability to control the end result.

So I would say that's 1 of the. Probably primary examples, and there are many. That are like that are essentially in the same vein for us. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, the dining classes. That's definitely 1 specific example. I've heard called out at a lot of the communities. I've been to. Once you have your other systems tied in that, you mentioned your medical record system and [00:08:00] your CRM.

Have you and Prophix work together to see what does this look like in the future for you? So what are you envisioning? Is there going to be the final outcome? Once you've got everything fully implemented? 

Lincoln Grimes: Yeah, so I kind of work with the customer success manager to work on some of those plans for us.

What I would see as an end result is more of a metric based planning and forecasting tool. So right? A lot of force multiplying. Planning considerations that can be made just inside the metric calculations. How can you simplify and scale the planning and results around fewer of the options to change so that's going to be a key for us.

 We're real innovative company trying to find new ways to serve. So it's really important for us to build robust proforma type modeling or hey, what is the what if scenario on this new product offering, or if we do increase our meals production for our meals on wheels [00:09:00] program a certain amount, what does that mean for us? of those things are included in it. I think at the core, it's really to trying to involve or be really transparent with the data in the system so that everybody, it's not a finance black box that, hey, everybody has access. And when we need to update assumptions that we have end user input. 

I think we want to get to that database tool that it is quick decisions quick work and trying to assess what our options are for decision making. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah, it's going to be a beautiful world when you get there. 

So taking a step back a little bit, Lincoln, can you talk about what led you to look for a system like this?

What evaluation criteria did you go through? And then John, maybe you can speak a little bit to how is Prophix different than other solutions out there? 

Lincoln Grimes: For us, it was really to solve those initial meeting with the future [00:10:00] state was have a good CFO. That's linked in with this as well.

We know what the future state looks like, but we were really looking for. Hey, we really need a budgeting and planning tool, and we were also in real need of a financial forecasting solution as well. My previous experience, I understood that this system. Or CPM system was well suited to meet those requirements currently.

For us, when we got to the stage of looking for a solution provider, we worked with three, Adaptive Insights, Vena, and Prophix.

And it was really important for us to, of course, meet our requirements. User adoption and intuitiveness were key. I think Prophix is the more malleable. It's been really intuitive and easy to use from a system administration perspective.

If you're trying to get from problem to solving within Prophix there seems to be an intuitive path to get where you need to go . There is [00:11:00] also the customer service platform. It really helps you get direct access to consulting hours.

We're all really busy and I'm not a system administrator only. So a lot of times I need to partner with somebody on a solution or something we need to do to help push the software forward. So that was another real thumbs up for us was to leverage that platform or those set of resources to do that.

 In our sort of work to bring on the platform to, we worked internally through a governance board to get the okay and approval, at least from that perspective of how did we make it happen? Corporate performance management, as you mentioned, is still a secret out there

to some extent. When we actually came to bear on the decision, it was really price. It was intuitive, and then it was the other benefits of the resources that we could have along the way. So those are the key aspects for us.

John Sabec: So yeah, there's a couple of different things that set Prophix apart from other solutions that are on the market. And [00:12:00] Lincoln actually touched upon two key areas from an ease of use standpoint, the tool has actually been designed by finance force finance. So from the end user standpoint, anytime you'd be navigating through the product, everything is done via point, click, drag, drop, or easy to use dropdown menus.

So really intuitive that really speaks to the reason why Prophix has such quick and high user adoption. Another key area that Lincoln had mentioned pertains to our customer success program. So we. Want all of our customers to really enjoy the product, and we really like to say that we take the white glove approach throughout the entire project, including the very early onset of the evaluation, where we're talking to our prospects and customers about their main pains and challenges and then carrying that through the implementation and post go live.

As well. So as Lincoln mentioned, anytime he needs a question answered, or if he requires some type of support, he can actually reach out directly to his customer success manager who then can actually provide them guidance. [00:13:00] In addition to that, I would say another key differentiator between Prophix and other solution really comes down to our integration capabilities.

So we've integrated with a hundreds of different source solutions from ERPs to EMRs, to CRM, to payroll systems. And we have the ability to go ahead and set up those direct integrations in order to go ahead and pull all that information into a model and Prophix, which then can be leveraged by end users in a number of different ways.

Amber Bardon: One of the questions I was going to ask you about was, what does an implementation look like? And I think you just answered a lot of that, but Lincoln, perhaps you could just share a little bit more about what resources did you need on your end to be part of the implementation? And how much time did you have to take of your regular day to spend on that?

Lincoln Grimes: So for ours, we used 1 of the Prophix partners to help us. So we had a dedicated group with a working consultant and a couple of other resources called in as necessary for ours. We had an interesting implementation because we. Signed [00:14:00] essentially in May and started to work and we needed to have a budget up

by October. So what we did for the 1st, a couple of months, or maybe even less than that was really just work on getting the financial reporting access and piece set up. So we got the financial piece in, got that loaded in, got our reports built within a couple of months. It satisfied the reporting solution requirement, and then made the data.

more transparent than I could push that data out everywhere I need it to. So that was pretty quick. Through the next three months, it was build and budget at the same time. So it was about three or four months. We did need to naturally extend our budget another month.

But it was really short time frame altogether, about six, seven months. And it was pretty exciting time.

Amber Bardon: What would you say a community needs to know or be prepared for when they're looking at an implementation like this?

Lincoln Grimes: I would say best practices [00:15:00] are try to ensure that around the organization, they're understanding what the finish line is that you're working toward. What I usually see is one software is not too different from another software once I get into a community, they're not sure what it is.

They're not sure what it does. So some of my better tips is trying to understand and educate and something we still do today is try to understand where it's at, but where it's going and what the tool is intended to do. Aside from that, focus on training as much as you can. Leverage Prophix for that.

Amber Bardon: And then John, from your perspective, when you're looking at potential partnerships with a senior living operator, what are you looking for?

What state of readiness do you need them to be in and what do you want them to think about before moving forward? 

John Sabec: Yeah, that's a great question. When we look for or partner with different organizations, we wanna make sure that the key stakeholders within the organization are buying into the product and they realize [00:16:00] the value of the tool, right?

And that extends not only across the finance department, but usually out across the entire organization. 'cause if you have multiple departments within the organization being able to leverage the tool, it's easier to go ahead and justify the nature of the investment with it. 

And in terms of readiness, we want to make sure that, the data that we would be pulling into a Prophix model has is accurate.

So sometimes there's a little bit of work that needs to take place up front in terms of getting that information into a good state prior to bring it into an app, any sort of application, right? Cause the old saying is so true. Garbage in garbage out. You don't want to be making any decisions on irrelevant information, right?

So spending that uptime front is going to save you a ton of time down the road. And then having that vision as Lincoln had mentioned. So not only thinking about the current pains and challenges that you're going to help solve immediately, but also where you want to take the product down the road. At the end of the day, it's a modeling [00:17:00] tool as he stated is malleable.

And, you can model out essentially anything, some of our customers over COVID built out inventory management models to track. Their personal protective equipment, they had different communities that different levels across different locations and to ensure that they were radically sourced, they were able to then go ahead and move around that equipment between their location.

Amber Bardon: Quick follow up question to that. If a community is thinking about changing a major system, so maybe they're going to be changing their G. L. system in the next year or so, would you recommend that they wait until they made that transition?

Or is it not a problem to set it up with the current system and then switch? 

John Sabec: Yeah, so that's a great question with respect to changing source systems. The nice part about Prophix is that we can essentially extend the longevity of your source system. If it's, just the reporting aspect, that's not meeting the requirement at the current moment.

Prophix can sit on top to pull in that data and provide the reporting capability and functionality. However, [00:18:00] if there is a need to go ahead and rip and replace, the nice thing about Prophix is that all we then would have to do is point it to that new source. The new database and then it's business as usual.

Amber Bardon: That's really good to know. I know I have a lot of clients in that situation where they're thinking about making a change, but they also want this technology today.

Let's talk a little bit about the future. What is going to be happening in the future with Prophix? Is there anything you're doing with AI? Is there anything you can share with us about exciting new developments or releases?

John Sabec: In terms of AI, we've actually invested in AI a number of years back in sort of the building blocks of the functionality within our product right now, we have what we call chart insights, where you can actually click on a specific chart or graph, or you can be in a report and Prophix can actually provide you a description.

Or commentary as it relates to what's going on within that actual data set. We also have what we call task assistance. So think of this as, Siri or the Alexa Prophix where you can actually use voice prompts [00:19:00] to have Prophix. Go ahead and pull up reports or runs key processes or even send out messages.

And then we also have predictive forecasting where you have the ability to leverage the data within your models to do forward outlooks based on different types of algorithms. 

Amber Bardon: Wow. That's really fantastic. That'll be really useful when you're doing your budgeting and your projections on the finance side.

John Sabec: Yeah, for sure. That's where we noticed that there was that big need. People really want to increase the timeliness when it comes to forecasting and planning. For some customers prior to moving on to platform like Prophix, like their annual budget cycle would take three or four months, right?

Yeah. By being able to go ahead and bring that all that information into one solution, we've cut it down to where some are now able to go ahead and turn it around within a couple of weeks. And in addition to that, the improved accuracy, like we have some that get within 1 percent to actuals from a variance standpoint, 

Amber Bardon: 

This has been such a great conversation. Is there anything we haven't covered that either [00:20:00] of you would like to share and make sure our listeners know before we wrap up? 

 As we were bringing the system on was it was education 1st.

Lincoln Grimes: It wasn't tell me what you want to build and the console mobile that it was, hey, go to school 1st. Learn these things, and then we're going to get together and we're going to talk about what you learned and we're going to go through this process before we engage in. The actual go live of things. There was some pre planning and homework that I maybe hadn't really experienced that with past system implementations.

John Sabec: At the end of the day, we want our be self sufficient, right? And the best way to do that is to take that train the trainer approach. 

 Just because organizations have been doing, Things one way for a long period of time. It doesn't mean that they continuously have to do So there's great technology great applications great software out there that are specifically designed to tackle key pain points. 

Amber Bardon: Thank you both so much for joining me today. Lincoln, I think it was so great that you were able to share your direct experience. I think our listeners will really appreciate hearing from [00:21:00] you. John, where can listeners find out more about Prophix if they're interested? 

John Sabec: They can actually just reach out to myself at jsabec@prophix.com. Alternatively, they could actually just go to Prophix. com and check out our website. 

Amber Bardon: Fabulous. And thank you both so much for being here. 

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