Every professional athlete (baseball, football, basketball, golf, etc.) goes back to the basics every year ( Spring training, summer workouts, strength training, etc.) to get ready for the coming season. Supply chain/value analysis professionals too should get back to basics once a year to ensure that they can continue to have double-digit supply chain savings each year. Here are three ways sure to make this happen:
- Establish or Refresh Your Strategic Value Analysis Plan: We have preached for years that one of the keys to success and sustainability of a value analysis program is to have a Strategic Value Analysis Plan update annually to guide your value analysis program for a new year. This is because every value analysis practitioner needs to review their prior year’s performance (e.g. savings, quality and outcomes) of their value analysis teams. Then take what you have learned from this process and then reinvent, reengineer and refine their value analysis program for another year.
- Retrain Your Value Analysis Teams to be focused on Best Value: No one becomes proficient in any art and science without frequent retraining, reskilling and reinventing what they do. Therefore, most professionals require a set number of continuing education credits to keep their license. It is the same with value analysis. If you aren’t providing advanced VA training upon on-boarding of new VA team members and then retraining your current VA team members annually, you will never, in my opinion, perform at peak performance.
- Retire Value Analysis Team Members That Performed Poorly: Most VA team members do an outstanding job for their VA teams, but a few will perform poorly (e.g. poor attendance, don’t complete projects, argumentative and uncooperative) and need to be retired and then replaced on your VA team. If you ignore these poor performers, they will pull down your VA team performance for as long as they remain on your VA teams.
These three simple ideas can help your value analysis teams remain vibrant, relevant and resourceful in any given year. But remember, if you aren’t moving forward with your VA program, you are probably moving backward.
Are you looking to raise the bar with simple and straight forward tools and systems? Why not view a demonstration of SVAH Solutions VA and Utilization Management Tools today. The demonstration is no cost and no obligation but the information is priceless!