Kaiser Permanente Automates Grants Billing with PeopleSoft Business Process Weaver
Kaiser Permanente is one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plans, serving 12.9 million members, with a research enterprise spanning nine research centers and a school of medicine. Billing for the sponsors behind that research is handled through PeopleSoft.
Industry
Healthcare
Service
Consulting
Solution
PeopleSoft Business Process Weaver
Grants billing is full of small manual steps, and at Kaiser Permanente’s scale, small steps add up. In 2023, Kaiser launched a billing automation improvement project to take those steps out of the process, which Oracle recognized as a 2024 PeopleSoft Innovator.
The Challenge
Kaiser’s billing process depended on manual work at multiple points. Users running billing had to find the billing interface number and process it by hand for each set of contract types, project types, or individual contracts. Sponsors who required invoices by email meant more manual effort to send and track. Every manual step slowed the path from creating an invoice to receiving payment.
The Solution
Kaiser worked with Mythics to deploy PeopleSoft Business Process Weaver (BPW), a framework that enables processes, such as batch programs, to run in parallel or in sequence as part of a defined business process. Kaiser turned on BPW for both as-incurred and fixed-amount billing, automatically triggering the billing interface whenever the contracts-to-billing process runs.
The project also rolled out new billing features alongside the automation. With new BI Publisher invoice formats in place, Kaiser enabled automatic email of invoices to sponsors as attachments, using selective adoption to configure the from address at the business unit or bill type level. The team also turned on the Attach Image Invoice option, so the invoice PDF can be viewed directly from the bill header.
Services provided:
- Business Process Weaver Deployment
- Automated Billing Interface Processing
- BI Publisher Invoice Formats
- Email Invoice as Attachment Configuration
- Attach Invoice to Bill Header Setup
The Results
- Manual billing steps eliminated. BPW eliminated the need to locate and manually process billing interface numbers for each billing run.
- Sponsor invoicing automated. Invoices now email to sponsors automatically as attachments, with status tracked systematically instead of by hand.
- Faster invoice-to-payment cycle. The implementation team reported improved timing on creating invoices and receiving payments related to grants.
- Oracle recognized the project as a 2024 PeopleSoft Innovator.
