In healthcare, inventory management isn’t just about tracking supplies. It’s about ensuring that the right materials are available at the right time so that clinical staff can focus on delivering patient care.
It sounds simple on the surface, however, effective inventory management can be a challenge for hospitals and other medical system organizations, which typically operate large, complex supply chains. Overstocking and understocking can lead to unnecessary costs and supply shortages, which can ultimately compromise patient outcomes.
Fortunately, Inventory Intelligence—a spotlight solution designed for healthcare—is emerging as a game-changer. Healthcare organizations can transform their supply chain operations and achieve better financial health and patient care by implementing in tandem with Infor CloudSuite ERP.
That’s because Infor CloudSuite frees up clinical staff from doing office administration work. So, rather than juggling spreadsheets and hunting down supplies, clinical workers can have more time to care for patients.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the challenges healthcare supply chain teams faces, the benefits of Inventory Intelligence, and how supply chain enhancements like these can be a great motivator for moving to cloud sooner, rather than later.
Understanding the Challenges Healthcare Systems Face
From nursing floors and Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR) closets to specialized departments like orthopedics or med-surg, managing inventory in healthcare is far from straightforward. And each area requires different inventory management strategies.
To further complicate things, healthcare organizations also deal with two distinct categories of supplies: patient-chargeable items and ancillary supplies.
These challenges, combined with vast inventories spread across a hospital or even multiple healthcare facilities, can make it difficult to keep track of what’s available, where it’s located, and what’s actually being used.
Common pitfalls include having low-usage inventory, that is, supplies that don’t move, often taking up valuable space. Another issue is balancing over/understocked items. Too much of one item or not enough of another can throw off patient care and lead to unnecessary spending.
Fortunately, your organization can manage these issues more effectively. With a deep understanding of usage patterns, the ability to quickly identify inefficiencies, and the right tools to make adjustments as needed, clinical staff can make inventory management woes a thing of the past. And a great place to start is with Infor’s Inventory Intelligence.
The Benefits of Inventory Intelligence
With Inventory Intelligence, hospitals can manage their inventories more strategically, reduce waste, and save on costs, while ultimately delivering better patient care. Let’s take a look at what Inventory Intelligence can bring to your healthcare organization:
Greater visibility: Inventory Intelligence provides healthcare managers with enhanced visibility across the entire supply chain. Whether supplies are in a central warehouse or scattered across various departments, a real-time view helps your team see exactly what’s available and where to find it.
As a result, your healthcare organization can make more informed decisions about ordering, restocking, and reallocating supplies. Moreover, increased visibility will save your clinical staff valuable time, allowing them to spend more time delivering critical care.
Reduction of low-usage supplies: Items that are rarely used or have low turnover can take up valuable space and tie up capital. Inventory Intelligence identifies these low-usage items and helps hospitals make smarter decisions about when to remove or replace them. This cuts down on waste and frees up space for more in-demand supplies.
Cost savings: As a function of smarter inventory visibility and management, your organization can identify and reduce overstock, and in turn avoid the costs of holding onto unnecessary inventory.
According to McKinsey, “a high-performing supply chain function can … reduce supply spend by up to 10 percent, and better position health systems to achieve their growth ambitions.” So, while it’s important to note that the financial benefits may take time to realize, possibly up to six months, the long-term impact on hospital budgets is undeniable.
Improved PAR Management: In traditional hospital environments, adjusting PAR levels to match actual usage can be a clunky, manual process. With Inventory Intelligence, hospitals can dynamically adjust supply levels, aligning inventory with real-time consumption patterns.
Put another way, hospitals can adjust inventory levels ahead of time based on changes in patient volume, such as during flu seasons or heavy elective surgery schedules. Knowing about such upcoming events ahead of time can help organizations like yours acquire needed supplies accordingly, and avoid the extremes of overstocking and understocking.
Optimal turns: Achieving optimal inventory turns, that is, the ratio of how often inventory is used up and replaced, is essential for balancing cost control with availability. With the Inventory Intelligence, hospitals can refine this balance, ensuring that they don’t have too much or too little on hand.
Simplifying the Process with Infor CloudSuite ERP
Historically, implementing inventory management systems in healthcare was a complex and time-consuming task. It required significant technical expertise, especially for legacy systems like Lawson.
Infor CloudSuite empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions for more accurate inventory management. If your business is already on CloudSuite, RPI Consultants can help streamline the implementation of Inventory Intelligence to optimize your practices over time without disrupting operations.
Shifting to a modern inventory management system requires careful planning, especially in optimizing PAR levels and inventory management practices. Partnering with experts like RPI ensures your organization maximizes its cloud investment at every stage.
Moving to CloudSuite isn’t just a technical upgrade, it’s an opportunity to realize many strategic advantages like operational efficiency, financial savings, and improved patient outcomes. If you’re still using Lawson for inventory management, now is the time to consider transitioning to the cloud with the help of an experienced provider like RPI.
RPI Consultants: Expertise Rooted in Partnership
To ensure healthcare organizations achieve the supply chain visibility they need, best practices encourage partnering with a leader in ERP application implementations and optimizations, such as RPI.
Doing so will help you be better positioned to streamline supply chains, reduce costs, and most importantly, deliver high-quality care to patients.
With over 25 years of experience in the Infor services space, RPI has a demonstrated history of partnering with healthcare organizations for complex Infor ERP projects. As a premier Infor Alliance CloudSuite-specialized partner, we can assist companies like yours in taking advantage of the full potential of your Infor software investment.
So, if your hospital is facing challenges with inventory management in Lawson or other legacy systems, it’s time to move to the cloud—where Inventory Intelligence leads to better outcomes for all.
To learn more about how Inventory Intelligence in the cloud can simplify your supply chain operations, register for our upcoming webinar below.
