Mahesh Sharma | August 12, 2008
case study | Medibank Private
MEDIBANK Private has more than 100 branches nationally and until recently any one of these could have been at risk as a result of a single error in the spreadsheet used to manage information on property and equipment leases.
Aaron Green says it was difficult to keep up manually with the organisation's properties Picture: Michael Potter
As well, having staff enter information by hand was extremely time-consuming and labour intensive.
"One loss of a site because we missed a key date or it was typed incorrectly into something else could be pretty bad for our business," Medibank national property manager Aaron Green says.
"It was just hard yakka to physically look at all the sites every day and keep up with what was going on.
"We had 100-plus sites and a big spreadsheet that was completed with all the different headings in different colours."
To defuse its spreadsheet timebomb, Medibank installed LeaseEagle, a web-based lease management system developed by local tech firm Synetek Systems.
That system made all the information easily accessible from one interface.
LeaseEagle sends out email alerts of critical events, provides a document bank allowing storage of additional information and multimedia, and can be accessed online from anywhere. It has also shortened the time needed to prepare audits and reports.
"It used to be a two-week task to add up our commitment for the remaining term of leases for audit purposes," Green says.
"Now it takes us about five minutes just because we've streamlined some of the reports.
"It was a huge windfall at the end of the financial year to be able to do that.
"Ten or 15 minutes as opposed to three weeks was a gigantic improvement."
The security, hosting and backup of the information was all handled off-site by Synetek.
The online delivery enables LeaseEagle's information to be accessed by employees across the business.
"Previously they would ring us, we'd have to sit down with them, roll out the sheets of paper and pull out the files."
Having all of Medibank's lease information in a central repository enables the insurance provider to more deeply analyse mainline business data.
"We've been pulling a bit of demographic data from the LeaseEagle system and the information on annual turnover for the centres, sales figures, etc.
"That's starting to build. There's 12 months worth of data they can use to demonstrate store performance.
"That type of data doesn't accumulate overnight.
It takes a bit of time to build up, but going into next year we're going to have two years worth of trend information they can make some decisions on."
Mr Green said the transition took about a month, which was mainly spent transferring information from the spreadsheet into templates provided by Synetek.
"They could have done for us for an additional fee, but we had resources here and we wanted to familiarise ourselves with the system.
"The only thing we had to do then was scan and attach key documents into the system.
"It was pretty seamless.
"Synetek could have done it for us but it chose to take it on here and it has done that really well."
Medibank shortlisted two other systems for the work, but ultimately overlooked these because they required more infrastructure investment to host on-site.
The problem:Medibank used a single spreadsheet to store and manage the information for more than 120 branches.
The process:
It installed Synetek's LeaseEagle software to centralise and organise the disparate information.
The result:
Medibank is now able to easily share its lease information across the business and plans on using business intelligence tools to made greater use of the information.