All Entries in the "Best Practices" Category
Driving your Hospital’s Supply Chain from a Dashboard
Some time ago I came to the realization that a dashboard is vital to the success of any hospital, system or IDN’s supply chain department. This is because the healthcare supply chain has become too complex to manage on the back of an envelope, inflexible spreadsheets or disparative systems. To be in ultimate control of [...]
Supply Business Intelligence: A Hospital Supply Chain Imperative
Way back when the life of a supply chain professional was simple, uncomplicated and relatively easy, our biggest worry as supply chain managers was customer service. Now, that criterion for success is only one of dozens of supply chain operational areas we need to keep our eye on. The times are changing, and we must [...]
Ready, Fire, Aim: Is this is a Formula for Hospital Supply Chain Success?
Robert Skrob, a renowned business coach, tells us that too often “We introduce processes and ways of doing things (in our supply chain business) without thinking through the goals, processes, responsibilities and control. It may be important to you to follow the entrepreneurial wisdom, ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ and execute a new program immediately rather than [...]
What Your (Internal) Customers Don’t Know Will Hurt You Financially!
Sometime ago we came up with a mantra that goes like this “Supply chain expense management is everyone’s business, not just the supply chain business”. We formulated this phase because we believe that supply chain professionals can’t make positive change in their hospital’s formularies without the full cooperation of their customers. That’s why some [...]
Hospital Cost-Cutting focus Shifts to Utilization
I think that most hospital executives are getting it that under healthcare reform many organizations will need to reduce their overall operating expenses by 15% – 20% (or, about five-percent below the Medicare rates you are receiving now) with supply chain expected to be a major contributor. The other big “aha” that is hitting home [...]
Are you Recognizing your Overachievers?
We often talk to our clients about the power of a rewards and recognition program for their value analysis team members, but our ideas unusually fall on deaf ears. This is always disappointing to us since we know, from industry studies and our own personal experience, that recognition is one of the most powerful human [...]
Are You Reporting Your Supply Chain Successes to Your Boss?
One interesting fact about supply chain management is that most supply chain managers, I have discovered, uniformly don’t employ monthly and annual supply chain management reports to their bosses. These reports should be designed to inform their bosses of the successes that they are achieving in their departments. Most supply chain professionals just assume that [...]
5 Hospital Value Analysis Best Practices?
I received a call last week from a supply chain professional who was reading our October issue of our Savings Beyond Price™ Letter* regarding an article on “Value Analysis Maturity Model: Where do you Stand?” and he wanted to know what were the hospital value analysis best practices that I talked about in this article. [...]
Competitive Intelligence: Your Window into the Marketplace
You might think that the term competitive intelligence is only applied in industry to describe the practice of defining, gathering, analyzing and distributing little known information about your competitors business to give you an edge in your marketplace. If that’s your take on this universal best practice, then you would be greatly mistaken. Competitive intelligence [...]
If you Don’t have a Data Warehouse you Lose!
If you don’t have a data warehouse that can be scaled, migrated and grown for the purpose of data mining than you lose in the new supply chain game of value analysis analytics. What I’m talking about here is the need for you to employ a data warehouse to manage, analyze and control your supply [...]
