WORKFORCE AND FINANCIAL PLANNING
The First Nations Health Authority is the health and wellness partner to over 200 diverse First Nations communities and citizens across BC. As the FNHA was being created in 2013, they recognized that technology was going to be an important part of managing what was to become a large organization. So right out of the gate, they decided to implement PeopleSoft to manage their Financials and HR, and Oracle EPM (at that time known as Hyperion) as their budgeting and forecasting system.
John Brkopac was the project sponsor for the budget system implementation in 2014 and we at BluMarble have maintained a relationship with FNHA to this day.
FNHA currently has 4 Oracle EPM applications in production. Let’s review what these applications do for the organization.
FNHA has a workforce of approximately 3000 active employees and contractors (as well as vacancies). They have 2 unions, as well as non-union employees, to manage. They budget by employee and position, salary grade and step, and track full-time, part-time and contract positions.
FNHA has an annual budget process where they budget out 5 years. They perform monthly adjustments to the employee data, and they reforecast quarterly. They have a comprehensive benefits plan that is driven by union/non-union considerations. They have Dental, Extended Life Insurance, Extended Health Insurance, Long Term Disability, and Critical Illness Insurance. The cost of these benefit programs is monitored closely and revisited every budget cycle. During their budget cycle they create multiple versions of the workforce budget and perform what-if scenario analysis to determine the impacts of salary and benefit related increases. Once the workforce budget has been completed and approved, the high-level employee expense data then flows into the budget application for Financials. This application manages the budgeting of both their Income Statement and Balance Sheet.
As FNHA is a public sector agency, revenues consist of various government grants (both federal and provincial), grants from the other BC Health Authorities, grants from Universities, as well as sponsorships. In addition, interest income, dividends and capital gains from their investment portfolio are captured and budgeted. We learned a lot about managing grants with our work at FNHA, and when implementing Oracle EPM as the campus wide budgeting system at SFU.
FNHA’s budget system is integrated with PeopleSoft, with automated feeds from both the Financials and HR modules.
Over the past 10 years, FNHA has developed a comprehensive library of standard reports, although there are 10 key reports that are most often used by the business. After the Workforce and Financials applications were put into production, FNHA realized that while actual expenses were being fed into the budget system for variance analysis, there was no way to track contract and commitment data. So, they were not getting their full expense picture. To address this, we developed an additional Oracle EPM application to track contracts and commitment data to provide them with this capability.
