You just found a major savings opportunity that is ripe for picking, now what? In a perfect world, especially in the world where products transcend to multiple departments and multiple hospitals in a system, the easy and sure thing savings opportunities may have a lot of challenges to bring them to fruition. Even though we have done this before with other products/categories, things are never the same in one product area or another and we must be mindful of how we approach these value analysis reviews so that we do not lose any of the valuable savings identified.
Below are just a few best practices that will help propel your value analysis reviews to wring the towel dry on all your savings opportunities and perhaps more!
1. Trust But Verify the Savings Opportunity Before You Jump Down the Rabbit Hole – Let’s face it, you and your customers’ time is valuable, and you don’t want to get caught going down a savings rabbit hole when it may not materialize. Before committing resources, take the time to rigorously validate the opportunity to ensure the savings are real and meaningful. Do a little more due diligence with the savings opportunity and test in perhaps small department to see if in fact these savings are real. It is better to do some research to ensure the savings opportunity is in fact real enough to commit your VA Team’s time to work on this. This proof will go a long way and give you confidence when customers try to talk away your viable savings opportunities.
2. Don’t Shoot from the Hip, Plan for Savings Success – It’s easy to jump straight into cost-saving initiatives, but that’s not always the most effective use of time. Often, momentum fades after the first few steps, leaving opportunities only partially realized. Instead, take a step back and map out the entire value analysis process from start to finish. Identify where gaps exist and what needs to be addressed to fully execute your savings initiative. While you may not have every answer at the outset, building a structured workflow allows you to fill in those gaps more effectively and sustain progress toward meaningful savings.
3. Find Your Expert(s) – You may know a lot about a product or very little, but that does not matter because someone in your organization is going to be an expert and know much more about this product than you do. Plus, they will be able to help guide you in those grey areas that often come up in VA studies that leave you wondering which way your study should go. By finding this expert or experts up front, you can enlist them to help you with your research, analysis, and implementation.
4. Remember What Value Analysis is and What it is Not – Value analysis is the study of function of products and the search for lower cost alternatives that meet your functional requirements at equal or better cost and reliability. Don’t get caught up in doing things that are not relevant to your value analysis study. Stick to finding out what functional requirements are not being met or which functions are being wasted with the current products and then look for alternatives to reduce costs and waste and improve performance. You can always test functionality and reliability in a value analysis study, but things like quality can become subjective in many cases. Stay with the classic tenets of value analysis for big results.
Back to Basics, Forward to Major Savings Results
The list of best practices could be endless but at the end of the day, I will always rely on these best practices because they help ground you in what value analysis is all about. VA is about making sure that we cover all our bases and don’t overshoot or undershoot functionality but instead meet our customers’ requirements exactly. Achieving savings does not have to be fancy, it just needs to be grounded in the basics that will give you results each and every time.
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