Heartland Dental: Automating and streamlining compensation management to scale operations quickly and help practices shine
Explore Heartland Dental’s journey with SAP
By providing industry-leading compensation and world-class operational systems, Heartland Dental strives to help its doctors be the best they can be. With the SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management solution, the company runs compensation and bonus plans efficiently and transparently, letting it adapt nimbly to serve practices’ rapid growth.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Healthcare | Effingham, Illinois | >20,000 employees |
reduction in month-end closing time.
in labor savings by automating compensation management.
transactions processed each month for five plans.
Chief Accounting Officer, Heartland Dental LLC
Modernizing compensation management with a scalable solution
The power of Heartland Dental LLC lies in turning “me” into “us” by providing supported practices with a range of expert support services from procurement to payer relations and marketing. The company helps more than 2,800 doctors and their teams to raise their standard of care and realize professional goals. But when it came to managing compensation for staff spread across 1,700 offices, Heartland Dental’s field operations teams were let down by manual processes.
They relied on error-prone e-mails to inform doctors about adjustments, approvals, and exceptions, the last of which had to be controlled by the finance team. Field operations staff themselves had little visibility into their own bonus calculations, battling delayed data readiness and the inability to drill into office-level details. Meanwhile, doctors had to wade through lengthy static PDF reports to find their compensation metrics. And this report data resided in multiple ancillary systems, reducing accuracy and timeliness and hindering tracking of KPIs and metrics. Monthly financial closing, for example, could take up to 11 days to complete.
In addition, manual calculation processes were not flexible enough to satisfy the rapid growth of supported practices.
Heartland Dental needed to replace this outdated technology with an automated solution that could expand with the company. The right offering would provide real-time data from one source on base salaries and bonuses for both doctors and field operations, as well as robust office-performance reporting. It would also give field operations staff more-granular data on complex aspects of compensation, allow for easier tracking and approvals of exceptions, and enable enhanced visibility and evaluation of compensation programs.
Building a user-friendly, self-service compensation hub
Heartland Dental had implemented SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) several years before. It used SAP Integration Suite and the SAP Smart Data Integration service to connect data across more than 40 remote sources. SAP HANA Cloud, the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, and SAP Business Application Studio supported data warehousing, analytics, and planning.
The company decided SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management was the right compensation management tool for multiple reasons. The solution was not just cost competitive but also offered the ability to extend functionality beyond financial planning and analysis through SAP BTP and integrate with offerings such as SAP Ariba solutions.
Heartland Dental saw SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management as a scalable, cloud-based solution that would bring automation, analytics, and empowerment to its doctors, field operations staff, and broader team members. Custom-code capabilities and advanced workflows would serve widely varying exception and adjustment needs across different bonus programs while serving multiple levels of hierarchal approval, allowing teams to deftly adjust compensation.
The company deployed SAP Crystal Reports offerings for its monthly and quarterly office performance reports. It also used the Embedded Analytics service for SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management for administrative validation and reporting.
Offering a one-stop shop for compensation and office-performance metrics
Heartland Dental now uses SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management to manage around US$0.4 billion in bonus payments for more than 4,300 unique plan users spanning doctors and dental operational staff.
An automated, integrated data system means financial closing is significantly faster, allowing the company to reallocate resources to other areas of need, employ people more effectively, and scale corporate accounting processes to match growth.
Users benefit from robust tracking, audit trails, and approval hierarchies and thresholds. Extensive custom-coded workflow processes can nimbly handle the large number of exceptions and adjustments needed throughout the year. Accounting staff need fewer e-mails to communicate these adjustments and exceptions and enjoy a more streamlined validation process.
A cloud-based, mobile-enabled experience consolidates each doctor’s and office’s performance in one tool that can accurately handle multiple bonus plans on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Intuitive dashboards give doctors and field operations staff alike access to real-time data that enables accurate reporting and enhances visibility into complex compensation components. Doctors can quickly consult information on their guarantees, quarterly and annual operational bonuses, monthly shareholder bonuses, and quarterly profit-share bonuses. And dental operations staff can initiate workflows and exceptions themselves, with intuitive approval routing based on dollar thresholds or advanced criteria using built-in logic rules.
Meanwhile, management has deeper insight into office, regional, and company profit-and-loss data and more detail on adjustments and exceptions. And they can use estimator widgets for “what-if” analysis of different variables for both doctors and field operations.
What’s more, on the IT side, cloud solutions reduce on-premise hardware, and role-based security is automated. IT teams are freed from manual data-collection and analysis tasks, and diverse teams across the company can access accurate data and add users without IT support.
Doubling user numbers within a constantly evolving system
Since implementing SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management, Heartland Dental has continuously enhanced and built upon its new compensation solution.
The company now plans to expand the solution’s use to encompass 10 bonus programs and more than 10,000 users from dental hygienists to support-office workers.
This will further simplify and streamline compensation management for practices, giving them even more freedom to focus on developing world-class experiences and patient care.