Sunrise Senior Living

Sunrise Senior Living (NYSE: SRZ), a McLean, Va. based company, employs more than 39,000 people. As of December 31, 2007, the company operated 439 communities, including 402 communities in the United States, 12 communities in Canada, 17 communities in the United Kingdom, and 8 communities in Germany with a resident capacity of approximately 54,000. It also provided pre-opening management and professional services to 44 communities under construction, of which 32 communities were in the United States, 3 communities were in Canada, 8 communities were in the United Kingdom, and 1 community was in Germany with a combined capacity for approximately 5,600 residents. Sunrise offers a full range of personalized senior living services, including independent living, assisted living, care for individuals with Alzheimer’s and other forms of memory loss, as well as nursing and rehabilitative care. Sunrise’s senior living services are delivered by staff trained to encourage the independence, preserve the dignity, enable freedom of choice and protect the privacy of residents.

The Challenge

During the 1990’s, Sunrise has seen tremendous growth and expansion of their operations, moving from local care to a place among the global Fortune 1000. Their existing PeopleSoft Release 7.5 applications had proven reliable but did provide the functionality, compliance and reporting flexibility needed to support their complex global business model – one that included the need to track the investment in and revenue from multiple legal entities, joint-venture partnering relationships and management contracts across multiple currencies. In addition, substantial manual effort was required to consolidate the information from different PeopleSoft databases installed in North America and Europe.

The Solution

Sunrise undertook a multi-phase Global Business Redesign (GBR) effort using a joint team of Collaborative Solutions and Sunrise resources from both the US and abroad, which formed the delivery team. The resources worked to update the core business processes and application functional designs to better serve current and future operational needs of Sunrise. Following a structured approach for PeopleSoft delivery, the joint team worked through the challenges of implementing a global business design through geographic and regulatory challenges. The team conducted a full lifecycle implementation that included global design sessions, proof-of-concept and user acceptance testing with business owners from the US, Canada and Europe. In addition, detailed user procedures and classroom based training was delivered for Sunrise communities around the globe using PeopleSoft’s User Productivity Kit (UPK).

The Results

With the first phase of the effort, operations were consolidated on a single instance of PeopleSoft’s Release 8.8 using the General Ledger, Accounts Payable and Project Costing modules. In addition, PeopleSoft’s User Productivity Toolkit (UPK) was deployed creating a single source of self-guided assistance for Sunrise users both at the corporate and field levels. Through the e-Expense initiative, Sunrise has been able to achieve greater traceability into and cost management of organizational spending. This strategic insight has allowed the organization to better forecast its spending needs and consolidate its vendor relationships. In addition, the e-Expense system helped strengthen the controls and approval processes around expense reimbursements as well as increase the enforcement of travel and expense business policies.