More than 70 percent of healthcare supply chain executives, in a McKinsey survey, identified collaboration with their customers, suppliers and even competitors as the greatest opportunity for their supply chain expense management reductions. Here are some ideas on how to collaborate with these stakeholders or competitors in your supply chain success:
- Customers: Value analysis begins and ends with collaboration with your customers, so maybe it makes good sense to have more diverse customers (food service, environmental services, blood bank, etc.) on your value analysis teams and committees. This way, you will obtain an even better perspective of your customer’s functional requirements.
- Suppliers: We have long thought that your suppliers are underutilized in the value analysis process. Henceforth, we see them as a Value Analysis Advisor™ who can perform hospital value analysis studies for you on their own products, services and technologies to improve their quality and reduce cost, thereby, adding their value to your value analysis process.
- Competitors: There is always something on which you can collaborate with your competitors. If you don’t believe me, just look at the dozens of joint ventures with competitive automobile manufactures that are growing every day. It could be a regional laundry, regional distribution center or supply benchmarking collaboration that brings you together with your competitors.
Collaboration, or the action of working with your customers, suppliers or competitors to produce or create something, is mission critical in the new healthcare environment we live and work in. No longer can we be “lone rangers” in our efforts to reduce our cost and improve our safety and quality. It requires a joint effort of stakeholders and competitors to make dramatic positive change possible.
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