Kaiser Permanente deployed Business Process Weaver to improve and automate their billing processes

Summary

Kaiser Permanente, in conjunction with their partner SpearMC Consulting, deployed Business Process Weaver to improve and automate their billing processes. They used this opportunity to leverage new billing features and functionality such as emailing the invoice as an attachment, attaching the invoice to the bill header to reduce manual steps, and improving the timing of creating invoices and receiving payments.

Customer comments

Kaiser Permanente has nine research centers and one school of medicine. In 2023, Kaiser along with the help of our partner, SpearMC Consulting, launched a billing automation improvement project to automate the billing processes.

As a part of this optimization project, a few of the new features were rolled out:

Business Process Weaver: PeopleSoft Business Process Weaver (BPW) provides a framework that allows processes (tasks), such as batch programs, to be defined and executed either in parallel or in sequence as part of a business process.

Kaiser turned on Business Process Weaver for both as incurred and fixed amount billing to automatically kick off the billing interface process when the contracts to billing process is run.

This eliminates the manual step of finding the billing interface number and manually processing the billing interface for the end user running billing for a set of contract types, project types, or an individual contract.
E-mail Invoice as Attachment: Along with new BI Publisher invoice formats, Kaiser turned on the ability to automatically e-mail invoices to sponsors as attachments.

This significantly reduces the manual work to invoice sponsors who require invoices via email and systematically tracks the status. We used selective adoption to pull in the new feature to configure the from e-mail address at the BU or bill type level.
Attach Invoice to Bill Header: Kaiser also turned on the feature “Attach Image Invoice Option” to allow the invoice PDF to be viewed from the bill header.

This project has allowed us to leverage new billing features and functionality, and to reduce manual steps to ultimately improve the timing of creating invoices and receiving payments related to grants.