The Healthcare Hub
How can you significantly influence your supply chain performance without the help of additional resources?
Healthcare provider organizations are tasked with this dilemma daily and the goal to go beyond just managing costs, but to actually reduce costs while improving patient outcomes. Supply chain specifically goes after this challenge with an eye toward expanding automation, using data proactively and improving contract price alignment.
Seattle Children’s took on the challenge of a Continuous Performance Initiative in order to reduce waste, achieve greater efficiency and grow without increasing department head count. They had worked with GHX for many years but realized that they were not fully utilizing the tools and solutions after attending a GHX Supply Chain Summit.
The top priorities were to improve order accuracy, increase automation and drive more on-contract purchases.
Improving order accuracy took on a multi-pronged approach that included standardizing workflows for buyers and taking proactive steps to eliminate the root cause of exceptions with documentation used to improve item master data accuracy. Additionally, attention was given to track exceptions throughout the day to identify specific suppliers that were driving up exceptions. Training to effectively use tools to identify exceptions, determine the root cause of the exception and take action to prevent them from happening again provides ongoing increases in order accuracy.
Another way Seattle Children’s proactively addressed pricing errors was to move more items into the item master to decrease special orders and by moving more products to contract. This was just another example of the value of translating data into action to reduce errors, which was possible by identifying root cause of exceptions.
Knowing that increasing electronic trading partners was at the core of better supply chain performance, Seattle Children’s began actively looking for ways to work with more of their trading partners electronically. Whether that meant identifying suppliers to encourage joining My Exchange, or using a GHX tool that allows them to send orders and receive POs electronically, Seattle Children’s now achieves the visibility, efficiency and accuracy gained through automation with a greater number of suppliers, even those that are not EDI capable.
This short video provides a snapshot of Seattle Children’s journey and the significant results from optimizing their use of GHX solutions.