SightLife Gains Visibility into the Numbers with Alight for Non-Profits
Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that the finance team at SightLife, one of the premiere eye banks in the world, is expanding the use of Alight Planning to move across the Planning Maturity Curve and make the move to Agile Planning.
Working with surgeons in over 30 countries, SightLife restores sight to more than 20 men, women, and children each day. This is accomplished through eye banking, which is the recovery and placement of eye tissue used in cornea transplants. As a nonprofit organization, SightLife needed a planning system that could handle sophisticated driver-based modeling. Jeanette Wilcox, Director of Finance at SightLife, remarked, “Donors and tissue have a shelf life measured in days, so we have to capture timing assumptions. The key driver for us begins with the number of donors, but then we adjust the volume via a transplant rate as not all corneas are transplantable. Then we have to break the model into four different areas to analyze a percentage of transplantable corneas that are shipped to a surgeon while breaking out the shipments into domestic and International since each has unique pricing models. We had already looked at several other budgeting software solutions that just didn’t seem to have the unit-rate-amount structure we needed to model out the revenue model which is highly driver-based. Alight took the time to really understand our planning objectives and confirm success even before we made the purchase.”
Don Koenes, Alight VP, Planning Solutions, led the consulting engagement, “SightLife presented a fundamental planning issue of forecasting supply and demand. By asking the right questions, and listening carefully, we developed an effective model based on key drivers and performance metrics. Just as important as getting the drivers right, we collaborated to ensure planning was at the right level of detail to support decision making. The model culminates with a gap analysis to forecast cornea availability for research and donation to developing countries or the need to acquire corneas to fill shortages. The cornea supply/demand model in turn drives revenue and expense models for tissue harvesting, storage, delivery and transplantation. An effective driver-based model has allowed SightLife to shift attention from maintaining to using their model as they progress through the Planning Maturity Curve and into Agile Planning.”
Tim McLaughlin, SightLife CFO, reflects on the success of the planning solution, “Alight’s implementation and support team’s extensive expertise helped us design the proper system to incorporate all the intricacies of fund accounting needed for our nonprofit organization. We have replaced multiple spreadsheets representing all divisions and projects with an integrated budgeting solution. As a nonprofit, we took the time to evaluate multiple software tools; Alight provided the most cost-effective, efficient solution for our budgeting, reporting and forecasting needs. The driver-based system has streamlined our budget process from multiple months to several weeks and the support has been excellent; providing one-on-one training anytime we requested.”
About SightLife
SightLife and its partner eye banks restore sight to an average of 20 people each day around the globe through the recovery and placement of eye tissue used in cornea transplants. SightLife is also a leading partner in efforts to establish new eye banks in developing countries, where 90% of the world’s estimated 10 million corneal blind men, women, and children live. For more information, visit http://www.sightlife.org.
About Alight LLC
Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 200 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pittsburgh Mercy, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning call 800-960-7717.
