Better Financial Management; Lower Operating Costs

Wadsworth Center Counts on Critical Financial Applications Built and Maintained by Alexander Associates

Wadsworth Center, part of the New York State Department of Health, is the nation’s most comprehensive public health laboratory. With diverse funding sources, six administrative divisions, dozens of laboratories, myriad testing programs, and hundreds of research professionals, Wadsworth is a complex organization with unusual financial management and purchasing challenges. These challenges are easier than ever to manage thanks to custom software designed, developed and maintained for the Wadsworth Center by Alexander Associates.

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Wadsworth's Mission

The Wadsworth Center of the NYS Dept. of Health is the nation’s most comprehensive public health laboratory. It combines basic and applied research and education in biomedical and environmental sciences with a public health mission of clinical and environmental testing and quality assurance.

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Project History

Wadsworth's prior fiscal management and purchasing systems were manually intensive, cumbersome and inflexible. Tracking funds and expenditures by source, project or researcher was problematic. Ordering supplies essential to the research and testing missions of the labs required too much paperwork and time. Wadsworth wanted accounting systems that offered greater degrees of control than the State Controller’s systems provided; and Wadsworth needed a more time-efficient and cost-effective purchasing system.

Following a competitive review, Alexander Associates was chosen to develop a systems requirements specification. This process involved meetings with management, staff and suppliers to ensure that all needs were carefully considered and ranked, and that potential solutions and benefits were explored.
Bill Kerr, Director of Lab Operations, recalls:

"Alexander Associates had this uncanny ability to distill what they heard from everyone and propose solutions that made great sense for this organization."

As a result of their work developing the requirements, Alexander Associates was engaged to design and build the Fiscal Accounting and Purchasing systems.

The Fiscal Accounting system:

• manages the organization of divisions, labs and projects and the researchers associated with projects;
• manages the allocation of funds, by funding source, to each of these levels of the organization;
  
• provides for easy posting and tracking of encumbrances and expenditures of funds;
• allows encumbrances and expenditures to be easily rolled-up from the project level up to lab, division and center levels by fund source;
• maps to the DOH's accounting system providing a cross-reference between Wadsworth’s more granular accounts and the NYS DOH's accounts.

The Purchasing system supports all of the Center’s procurement processes and functions, including:

• entry of purchase requests by researchers and/or division administrative staff
• verification and encumbrance of funds in the Fiscal Accounting system
• categorization of purchased items for subsequent analysis and reporting
• management of required licensing and protocol information
• automatic routing of purchase requests for fiscal and departmental approvals
• facility for purchasing department staff to review, approve and route purchase requisitions
• conversion of requests into a variety of purchase orders including DOH purchase requests/orders, contract vendor purchase orders, and purchase authorizations
• full EDI with contract vendors and suppliers
• automated interfaces for contract vendors to enter receiving and invoicing data
• automated auditing of purchase receiving and invoicing amounts
• full integration Wadsworth's accounting systems

With the deployment of each system, the benefits to Wadsworth were enormous and immediate. The Fiscal Accounting system provided, for the first time, the detailed information the Center needed to efficiently manage its complex, growing operations.

The benefits to the purchasing operations were even more dramatic. According to Sheila Phelps, Director of the Fiscal Purchase Unit,

"We went from an antiquated purchasing system to just-in-time delivery of many goods and services. Users get what they need when they need it, and have no bureaucratic impulse to over-order, warehouse or waste."

Today

Today, Wadsworth users process four to five hundred orders a week and the Center writes one check weekly for most of these goods and services. Alexander Associates has continued to enhance this system in recent years with the addition of Contracts Management module, migration from Informix to Oracle databases, and development of comprehensive web reporting tools.

The bottom line: Bill Kerr reports that

"software systems from Alexander Associates have reduced the administrative burdens of running the Wadsworth Center thus saving considerable New York State tax dollars."