If you are a healthcare supply chain manager who is looking to move up to the C-suite over the next few years, then you need to understand the power of metrics to pinpoint your supply savings opportunities. No longer will your intuition be enough to ferret out these savings; you will need hard evidence to ensure that your supply chain teams won’t find dry holes. If you can prove that you have the ability to predict where your next savings opportunity will be coming from, then you are ready to move up to the C-suite. If not, you will want to read further.
The Changing Face of Healthcare Supply Chain Management
Historically, supply chain has been seen as a service organization, but while this is still true, supply chain today also needs to be a savings machine to help the healthcare organization stay afloat. Since your GPO savings is slowing to a trickle, supply chain professionals must rely on analytics to identify where their next savings opportunity is hidden.
Why Should Analytics be Important to You?
There was a time when hospital supply chain managers could depend on their GPOs to provide 99.8% of the savings they needed to satisfy their management. That was yesterday, this is today when your GPOs are struggling just to match their savings with the rate of inflation. Yet, there are still literally millions of dollars of unrealized savings at most hospitals, systems, and IDNs if you know where to look for them. This is why analytics should be important to you. It can open the door to a whole new world of savings.
Acquiring Analytics Capabilities
For a free standing hospital, it makes good business sense to outsource your supply analytic functions, since the investment in software, acumen, and resources necessary to operate this new department will be too costly to consider developing internally. On the other hand, large systems and IDNs should consider:
- Actively training their current staff in the analytics discipline.
- Hiring new analytics talent if internal talent is non-existent.
- Combining active training internally and hiring new talent.
- Leasing/renting software from a software provider.
No matter what options (above) you elect for your healthcare organization, adopting a supply chain analytics strategy is always the right thing to do to keep your savings flowing.
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