Cure International is the largest provider of speciality surgical care in the developing world. With 226,000 surgeries, 10 hospitals and 29 developing countries – Cure is the global leader in pediatric interventions and operates in some of the world’s toughest linguistic and regulatory contexts.
The Challenges
CURE’s mission breeds its own complexity. “Not a lot of companies operate in 29 developing countries.” For the past eighteen years, CURE trusted an overly cumbersome on-premise ERP system to manage hospitals ranging from Afghanistan to the Philippines.
“The challenge was getting information from the developing world into the US headquarters,” says Chief Financial Officer Mark Knecht. “Our business data was coming in 45 to 60 days after.” Added to the limited bandwidth of its service regions, this lag stymied CURE’s efforts to manage exchange rates, inventory and financial reporting.
Before Xledger, CURE faced several major challenges:
- Lack of sound financial control over multi-national subsidiaries
- ERP platform with multiple bolt-ons
- No insight in remote regions
- Inefficient paper-based approval processes
The Solution
During a visit to Colorado Springs, Knecht met the leadership of Xledger. Intrigued by Xledger’s functionality, Knecht soon brought CURE’s leadership to a sales meeting at the ERP provider’s US office. “One of the first things we noticed when we took a look at Xledger was the excellence…They’re people on a mission to make the world a better place.” After a brief product demonstration, Knecht and the CURE International leadership gave their wholehearted approval, immediately seeing that the system would bring much-needed insight to their organisation. The system provides real-time data even in the limited bandwidth of many CURE locations. Executives sitting at CURE’s headquarters in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, can view payroll and inventory for hospitals across the globe.
“Xledger enabled us to heal more children,” Knecht says. “Whereas before we were operating like ten independent hospitals, it enabled us to operate as a network with ten independent locations.
“Xledger transformed us. We want to double our surgical capacity over the next five years, and we believe Xledger is one of the crucial decisions we have made to make that a reality.”
Their partnership with Xledger transformed CURE by:
- Sharpening insight through tools including segmented reporting, inquiry browsers & homepage dashboards
- Enabling CURE International’s global leaders to see and make changes to their entire organisation with one touch
- Removing limits with scalable structure, multi-currency functionality & effortless addition of new business units.
- Improving time and resource management through automatic bank reconciliation, document management, and posting suggestions
- Optimising controls with a fully-integrated accounting platform
- Consolidating financial statements across the organisation
- Reducing the accounting cycle from days to minutes
- Saving hundreds of hours of accounting labour
“Xledger is a fantastic partner for us. We have immediate visibility into our data, allowing for faster analysis and a much stronger basis for quality decisions. The minuscule bandwidth requirements allow us to function seamlessly across the globe, even in the developing world. All of these factors have resulted in our saving time and money. We are also pleased with the level of service, far exceeding our expectations from experience with other ERP vendors. I would highly recommend Xledger!” says Knecht.