Hartford Hospital is an 800 bed regional medical facility that supports the city of Hartford, Connecticut and surrounding areas.  Sixteen different affiliates, including MidState Medical Center, Clinical Lab Partners, various physician groups and VNA Health Care, provide services with support from the hospital.  Over 9,600 employees within this structure receive payroll and HR functions by systems running in the Hartford Hospital data center.  It is the responsibility of the IS finance group to ensure these systems perform at peak efficiency and that payroll goes out on time.  Dennis Rider, Systems Manager, Information Services, supervises this group.

In addition to processing payroll weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly, Dennis Rider's team of nearly 20 people support the entire range of financial systems the Hartford Hospital business structure requires.  This includes employee benefits, accounts payable and receivable, and inventory services for all items throughout the enterprise.   Needless to say, it takes some very robust technology to support the organization and keep all of that data up and running.  

"We are constantly concerned about the performance of our enterprise systems, mainly due to the number of heavy users relying on them.  We have close to 1,000 people requisitioning items through our systems on a daily basis" says Mr. Rider.  From linens, to surgical supplies, to uniforms, all requests are made through GEAC's SmartStream™ enterprise software that is the foundation of the financial systems at Hartford Hospital.  In addition, roughly 350 power users access the system daily to update information about various data points.  "This is a mission-critical 24x7 application that requires sub-second response time," states Mr. Rider.  

To improve service levels to his organization, Dennis and his team began to evaluate an upgrade to SmartStream 7.0.  The performance enhancements were very appealing, but it became apparent to the team that an accompanying upgrade in server processing power would also be required.  

"I started working with Regan Technologies about a year ago to evaluate our systems," states Mr. Rider.  Members of the Regan Technologies Sales and Engineering team sat down with Mr. Rider and began to help him define his requirements.

"We were hoping to improve overall performance, the client response time, and the batch cycle run-time for payroll.  The challenge I face is that I have a set window of batch processing time to complete payroll.  We've grown from an initial load on the system of about 10 GB to over 300 GB in three and a half years," says Mr. Rider.

Regan Technologies helped Mr. Rider and his team evaluate a number of server options and ultimately helped them settle on the Sun™ E2900 Server.  "We couldn't be happier," states Mr. Rider.  "We've been able to reduce the run time on some of our larger jobs from 5 hours to 40 minutes.  This far exceeded our expectations."

Of course, no technology implementation is without its hiccups.  During an upgrade from Solaris™ 7 to Solaris™ 9, several technology issues were encountered.  Mr. Rider called upon Regan's engineering talent to resolve the issue.  The Regan engineers worked directly with Sun's technical team to resolve the issue quickly and efficiently.  

"The staff at Regan Technologies has been invaluable to me during this project" says Mr. Rider.  "They are always accessible and just a phone call away.  They have come in to meet with us numerous times and helped with the installation of the new hardware.  They also assisted with an upgrade of our database systems and with countless technical suggestions that helped improve performance.  They are a friendly and supportive group who goes out of their way to understand our needs and how things work here on a day-to-day basis."