Supply Chain Productivity: It’s all about Accountability!
This is a topic (supply chain productivity) that isn’t often addressed in supply chain circles, but it is becoming even more important today as your supply chain labor resources are shrinking right before your eyes.
When I was a supply chain manager I had to justify my (current and proposed) FTEs, each and every year, by showing my hospital’s budget manager that my workload and volumes supported my budget requests. That’s where I learned to develop labor standards and use productivity tools to instill accountability, eliminate productivity losses, and develop staffing predictability into my supply chain operations.
I even started to do time and motion studies that I learned as an organizational management major in college to determine the most efficient way to perform the numerous supply chain jobs that were under my department’s responsibility. For example, I once did a time and motion study to determine the best way to reprocess our thermometers (yes, we did reprocess them in the 60s and 70s) in my central supply department. By doing so, I found we could eliminate steps, reduce material cost and streamline what we had been doing for years, since no one ever questioned why we were doing it this way.
On the flip side of the coin, I have watched department heads lose staff every year because they couldn’t or wouldn’t value-justify why they needed all the staff they had in the first place. By the way, I never lost staff and was able to hire new staff almost at will, since I had the standards, statistics and data to back up my requisition for new hires. And I never asked for any staff that wasn’t absolutely positively necessary. This attitude helped me to build trust with my management that when I asked for staff they knew I really needed them.
You can do the same…
To this end, I have found that supply chain managers that have superior productivity and absolute control over their labor cost employ labor productivity software to measure and manage their staffing. If your hospital doesn’t have such software in place now, then I would suggest you develop, buy or subscribe to one that can enable you to coordinate all aspects of your department’s work into an integrated system. In this way you will not only be accountable for your labor resources, but you will be able to push back on any effort by your management to reduce your staffing.
Filed Under: savingsblog • Supply Chain
