HEALTHCARE · ONCOLOGY
At Instituto Mario Penna, the close went from 30 days to less than a week.
The controllership of a hospital institute with hospitals, research centres and distinct business units, leaving the spreadsheet behind.
Jussara Braga, controller
The starting point
A hospital institution with more than five decades of operation carries constraints few corporate settings know: varied business units, multiple accounting processes and manual routines that turn the close into a recurring bottleneck.
At Instituto Mario Penna, the monthly cycle depended mostly on Excel spreadsheets and tables. Working out the results — in an institution operating hospitals, research centres and distinct business units — required cross-checks that stretched the close over 30 days, up to delivering the management package to the board.
Cost was not the deadline
That is what the deadline consumed. The controllership team spent most of the month collecting, validating and formatting data, leaving little room for variance analysis, projection and supporting the board.
Depending on a manual process made building the reports controllership itself needed slow — which hurt visibility of the figures and, as a result, executive decision-making.
What the sector demanded
The choice combined requirements common to any large operation with the hospital's own specifics. The central one was consolidating data from hospitals, research centres and distinct business units, in place of the manual collection and matching that held the process together.
Then came automating the recurring management reports: reports, metrics and budget-versus-actual comparisons generated on the platform itself. And integration with the ERP running at the institution, so data could flow continuously between the transactional system and the consolidation environment.
The result
The cycle that took 30 days is now finished in less than a week, with an 80% efficiency gain. The cut did not come from speeding tasks up: it came from eliminating whole stages of manual checking between spreadsheets, which stopped existing once consolidation ran directly on the platform.
The second change was one of scope. Controllership began delivering insights, metrics, charts, scenario simulations, budgets, projections and financial statements, plus the budget-versus-actual comparison. The team, previously busy consolidating, gained capacity to analyse.
THE INTERFACES IN THIS CASE
Want to see this on your own figures?
The assessment is a 30-minute conversation about how your planning runs today.
OTHER CASES
Who else left the spreadsheet
-
Insurance brokerage
Alper Seguros
Significant reduction
Close time
A brokerage with a highly regulated operation, reporting to the securities regulator and to an international parent.
Read the case
-
Engineering and infrastructure
SNEF Brasil
Eliminated
Side spreadsheets
Electrical engineering, industrial automation and infrastructure, with more than 100 years of global history.
Read the case
-
Food and retail
Dengo Chocolates
Access segregated by manager
P&L by store
Artisan chocolate, with dozens of stores across the country and a growing operation.
Read the case