Information Systems Proposal – Financial Management System (OHFMS)

Release Information
Name of the Oasis Hospital Financial Management System (OHFMS)
Information
System/Subsystem
Description An online system that allows the management of the financial processes of the
hospital aiding the staff and the hospital management in delivering services
across organizational entities with regard to finance which include accounts
receivable, accounts payable, account reconciliation, transfers, etc. With its
implementation, the users will be provided personalized web-based access to a
centralized financial management system.

The current financial information system will be replaced by the FMS and all
data from the current system will have to be ported-over and further integrated
unto this system as data source. With finance as an important aspect of the
organization, the FMS will be integrated in the Enterprise Resource
Management (ERP) system of the hospital.

The following modules will comprise the FMS system.

A. General Ledger
This module is the official record of financial transactions such as the budgets,
budget checking rules, ledgers, and chart of accounts of the hospital which are
setup within. The major General Ledger processes are:
• Maintain budgets
• Maintain chart of accounts
• Journal entries
• Maintain ledgers
• Receive accounting entries from the other modules
• Reporting

B. Accounts Payable (AP)

The Accounts Payable application is used to enter vouchers (online or batch)
and make payments. The major Accounts Payable business processes are:
• Receive and process payment requests such as:
o Procurement (PO and Non-PO), Contracts, and Projects from the
Supply Chain Management System (SCMS)
o Payroll, Grants, and Travel and Expenses from the Human
Resource Management System (HRMS)
• Payments
• Accounting Entries to General Ledger

C. Accounts Receivable (AR)

The Accounts Receivable module works with Billing to track incoming
payments. The review functions of these modules allow for an overview of the
status of both billing and accounts receivable items. Major Accounts Receivable
business processes are:
 • Receive accounting entries from Billing of the Electronic Medical Record
(EMR) System
• Review entries
• Accounting Entries to General Ledger

D. Treasury (Cash Management)

The Treasury module manages the administration of cash for the hospital. This
includes reconciliation to ensure proper accounting of cash payments and
receipts. The major Treasury business processes are:
• Receive accounting entries from the Collections module of the Point of Sale
System (POS) and from the bank accounts
• Reconcile accounts
• Accounting Entries to General Ledger

E. API Connector Module

This module links the system to the Integrated Silo System (ISS) proposed for
the hospital so records that are added into the system will have to pushed to the
API provisioned by the ISS and any updates or removals should also be pushed
the same. On the other hand, the system should also be allowed by the ISS to
extract records from external systems such as from the SCMS, HRMS, EMR,
POS, etc.

F. System Authentication and Access Control Module

This module allows the system to connect to the Active Directory (AD) services
through the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) of the hospital for
authentication allowing access to finance personnel and provisioned employees
to logon to the system. The system will further allow the definition of the access
control for the users and assign them on groups and further define their
capabilities and module access. These set of parameters will define their
interaction with the system.

Status On-going development – to be completed by April 2020

Development Strategy Development (Vendor)

The application framework to be used is a proprietary software from Oracle
Corporation, the PeopleSoft ERP. The development, features, updates and
upgrades are supported by the company.

Deployment (In-House)
The deployment of the application into the IT infrastructure of hospital will be
handled by the in-house IT Department.

Computing Scheme Networked Systems – Local Area Network (Intranet)

The application can be accessed in the internal network of the hospital. On the
other hand, if it’s to be accessed from an external network, the provisioned user
is required to logon through the hospital’s VPN.
 Internal Authorized Employees - these are individuals working for the hospital who are
allowed to interact with the FMS such as create entries, route requests, and other
activities that directly represent the interest of the Finance department. They are
also hospital employees.

Reporting Officers – are hospital employees, usually managers, or senior

members of the hospital that handles one or more employees, and has the
responsibility of leading a group. They are the first level approver of requests
by authorized employees of the FMS. They are also hospital employees.

Authorized Finance Personnel – are finance personnel who are allowed to

Users interact with the FMS such as approvals and other activities that directly
See glossary for
definitions represent the interest of the Finance department. This includes the Chief
Financial Officer, the Finance Manager, the Senior Accountant, the
Administrative Director, and the Director of RCM and their respective direct-
reports. They are also hospital employees.

FMS Administrator - a hospital employee under the IT department of the

hospital. The employee specializes in financial information systems and has
knowledge of the accounting processes. They are also hospital employees.

External Not Applicable – no users external to the organization are allowed to access the
FMS.

Owner Finance Department

Requirements A. Software
A.1. File Server Software Requirements
• Microsoft Windows Server OS, UNIX, or Linux operating system platforms
• NFS or comparable networking software
• PeopleSoft software

A.2. Application Server Software Requirements

• Microsoft Windows Server OS, UNIX, or Linux operating system platforms
• Oracle Tuxedo
• COBOL Compiler
• Database connectivity package
• PeopleSoft Application Server files and code

A.3. Web Server Software Requirements

• Microsoft Windows Server OS, UNIX, or Linux operating system platforms
• Windows IIS or Apache

A.4. End User Workstation Software Requirements

• Microsoft Windows, UNIX, or Linux operating system platforms
• Browser

B. Hardware
B.1. File Server Hardware Requirements
A typical file server configuration requires the following items:
• A x86-64 based machine running Oracle Linux 5.8 or later, or Microsoft
Windows 2012 or later.
• Alternately, UNIX machines that support NFS or comparable networking
software.
• Sufficient disk space to accommodate the following:
a. PeopleSoft software — 20 GB or more, depending upon the
PeopleSoft applications
b. Operating system and any optional monitoring software
c. Other required 3rd party software, such as Microsoft Office, as
required by the application or customer.
• Sufficient memory to meet your network operating system requirements.
• VGA display output with resolution of 1024 x 768 with 16K colors required.
• Backup system

B.2. Application Server Hardware Requirements

A minimum of two processors is recommended, and at least four processors for
production.
• Oracle recommends the latest or near-latest processors available.
• The memory requirement is 8 GB (minimum) per server for roughly up to
25 users.
• Oracle Tuxedo requires 1 GB RAM minimum, and at least 4 MB of RAM
for each Oracle Tuxedo system server.
• Sufficient disk space to accommodate:
a. Oracle Tuxedo (200 MB)
b. COBOL Compiler
c. Database connectivity package varies per database RDBMS
platform. Check with your vendor for requirements.
d. PeopleSoft Application Server files and code (4 GB)
e. Oracle recommends an additional 512 MB to 1 GB of disk space,
depending on the applications installed.

B.3. Web Server Hardware Requirements

Web servers are multi-threaded and will use one or more threads per active user.
Further they are based on Java. There will be significant benefit from running
the web server on multi-processor and multi-core machines with large amounts
of memory.
• 4 GB of memory or higher is recommended for each web server.
• 1 GB recommended disk space for the web server software.
• The space required for log files depends upon the number of web server
domains and number and type of logins to the PeopleSoft Pure Internet
Architecture.
• PeopleSoft web servers tend to use a very high number of execute threads,
file descriptors, and TCP sockets.
• Proper tuning in these areas is required.

B.4. End User Workstation Hardware Requirements

• 4 GB of RAM is the minimum recommended for 64-bit computers
• Intel® Core™ i3 or equivalent is recommended
 • VGA controller and display of 1024 x 768 resolution or higher and High
Color (16 bit) mode for the best display results

C. Network
• 100- BASE-T Ethernet network
• Redundant Gigabit Ethernet between the servers generally guarantees
adequate performance

Diagrams General Ledger

Figure 7.2.1 General Ledger Use Case

Accounts Payable

Figure 7.2.2 Accounts Payable Use Case

Accounts Receivable

Figure 7.2.3 Accounts Receivable Use Case

Treasury

Figure 7.2.4 Treasury Use Case

API Connector Module

Figure 7.2.5 API Connector Module Use Case

System Authentication and Access Control Module

Figure 7.2.6 Authentication Use Case

SCREEN GRABS
Figure 7.2.7 General Ledger Screen Grab

Figure 7.2.8 Accounts Payable Screen Grab

 Figure 7.2.8 Accounts Receivable Screen Grab

Figure 7.2.9 Treasury Screen Grab

Analysis While the current systems in place are still serving their purpose but these
embodied a non-integrated information system and have thus resulted to
redundancy and tedious efforts amongst organizational entities. Worse, report
generation especially on the financial aspect takes some time thus resulting to
delayed strategic decisions which will become painful for the hospital in the
future.

The Financial Management System is proposed in response to the IS Strategic

Goals of Oasis which is to develop an ERP management to address issues on
Supply Chain and Financial Systems. As a long-term solution that will replace
the current unintegrated human resource and accounting system, it is imperative
that the hospital implement solutions which can be tailor-fit to the existing and
future needs of the organization.

With the move to implement an ERP system to resolve all issues and challenges
at hand, Adobe’s PeopleSoft Financial Management System is a great deal to
achieve the organization’s IS goals. While the PeopleSoft’s FMS offers a lot of
modules and applications which the hospital can make use to their advantage,
however, the transactional systems are already in place and are still working,
thus only selected FMS modules will be used- the General Ledger, the Accounts
Payable, the Accounts Receivable, and the Treasury. The FMS will only serve
as a General Ledger and an Accounting platform for Oasis with the following
objectives:
• centralize journal entries for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and
Treasury to the General Ledger
• reconcile account balances
• systemize payment requests, approval, and disbursements
• generate real-time or periodic financial reports

Considering that the transactional systems are functioning in different

platforms, some under the PeopleSoft umbrella, and are working independently,
there has to be a mechanism that would allow the FMS to extract these
accounting entries; and as proposed, through the Integrated Silo System (ISS).
As a result, payment requests from the different systems- HRMS (payroll, travel
and expenses, and grants), CSMS (procurement, contracts, and projects) after
being duly approved by the reporting officers, will be routed to the FMS for the
review, approval, and processing.

The review mechanism is in place to make sure that the requested payment is
still within the parameters of the budget before it will be routed for approval.
Only then, will the payment process commence and once done, will be posted
as a Journal Entry to the General Ledger (Cash-out).

On the other hand, the Accounts Receivable module will only port the data from
the EMR through the ISS and post corresponding entries to the General Ledger
after being reviewed by the personnel from Finance. Likewise, the Treasury
module ports accounting entries from the bank accounts of the hospital and from
the collections module of the Point of Sale System via the ISS to reconcile cash
balances and post as a Journal Entry to the General Ledger (Cash-in).

The General Ledger module also offers a reporting mechanism allowing the
financial managers to have a bird’s eye view of the real-time financial status
and periodic financial statements of the hospital. With the FMS integrated to the
ISS, data interoperability and efficiency will never be the same again and will
thus allow the hospital achieve its strategic goals.

Gantt Chart: Development to Deployment

Development Strategy
The proposed system will use PeopleSoft Financials software which is provided
by the Oracle Corporation. This application will require 5 servers to be
configured, namely: Application Server (2), Web Server (1), Batch Processing
Server (1), and Database Server (1). The IT Network and Infrastructure, and
Systems team will have to commission and prepare these servers that will meet
the required hardware and software specifications and prepare the network for
communications.

The development will start on September 2019 and will last up until December
2019. The launch of the system will be scheduled for March 2020. There is
nothing much to develop since the FMS will just port data from external
sources. Since the current system has already accumulated a huge amount of
data from since its operation, data migration is given an ample time to give way
for the migration.

Deployment Strategy
The IT Network and Infrastructure team and IT Systems team have to ensure
that proper redundancy is implemented both in the network and the server itself.
An aggregate network connection has to be set up and configured for all network
connections in the server. The IT systems team has to ensure that all files and
data are replicated in a safe and secure location. The IT systems have to ensure
that an image of the system is always available in case of catastrophic failure in
the production system. This ensures that lesser downtime will be experienced,
and the integrity of data is maintained during these unfortunate events.

The deployment of the system to the production will be handled by the IT

Network and Infrastructure team and the IT Systems team. Together with the
HRMS administrator, they will be called a deployment team. The vendor of the
system on the other hand, will delegate one of its representatives to work closely
with the Oasis Hospital FMS deployment team during the deployment process.
The deployment team has to ensure that the system is running properly before
launch.

Costing and Investment

a. Investment costing

PeopleSoft Component Number of Slated Financial

Investment Cost
Component License Price Licenses Year Budget
 Financials $4,595.00 5 2019 $22,975.00

2019 (50%) and

Treasury $28,995.00 5 $144,975.00
2020 (50%)

Total Investment Costing for FY 2019 $95,462.50

Total Investment Costing for FY 2020 $72,487.50

Total Investment Cost $167,950.00

b. Recurring Costing (optional)

PeopleSoft Software Number of Slated Financial Recurring Cost

Component Update & Licenses Year
Support Price
Financials $1,010.90 5 2020 onwards $5,054.50
Treasury $6,378.90 5 2020 onwards $31,894.50
Total Recurring Costing for FY 2020 $36,949.00
Total Recurring Costing for FY 2021 $36,949.00

Training and Implementation

Only limited employees have access to the FMS dashboard, thus would be
manageable to train. Training will only cover the review of ported Journal
Entries from the other independent systems through the ISS before its posting
to the General Ledger and routing request for approval for Accounts Receivable
items.

It is a must that data migration is already done before the implementation. The
system owner, the FMS Administrator, and a representative from the vendor
will compose the deployment team who will monitor the implementation.

Audit and Maintenance

The audit of the system should be performed and it should follow the set
audit policy of the hospital. The involved party, IT Department, FMS
administrator and the owner of the system should ensure that proper
maintenance and security practices are applied in handling and managing
the system. Patching for the system should be deployed and performed by
the FMS administrator from time to time.

In the event of downtime, the FMS administrator should work closely with
the vendor in order to resolve the issues in a timely manner.

Conclusion

PeopleSoft’s FMS is one of the best enterprise financial software offered in

the market. And while this kind of enterprise software comes at a cost for
 the hospital, however, weighing its benefit to the business workflow, the
software is good to have as an investment.

References [21] Getting Started on PeopleSoft Installation

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E55418_01/psft/acrobat/Getting_Started_on_Peopl
eSoft_Installation_072014.pdf

[22] Key Functions of Your Accounting Department

https://www.pcg-services.com/key-roles-accounting-department/

[23] Ledger Screen Grab

https://peoplesofttutorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/image2.png

[24] Accounts Payable Screen Grab

https://training.onesource.uga.edu/UPK_Training/Oracle/Publishing%20Cont
ent/HTMLPages/tpc/78788163-d646-443a-bd15-56d159765952/69.png

[25] Accounts Receivable Screen Grab

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E39583_01/fscm92pbr0/eng/fscm/fare/img/i-
72fe8c86n-7d25.png

[26] Treasury Screen Grab

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E51433_01/fscm92pbr2/eng/fscm/ftcm/img/i-
72fe8c86n-7a62.png