Three Ways to Improve Supply Chain Processes: Inventory Management, Integration, and Reconciliation

Supply chain plays an integral role in hospital operations. Since its impact spans the organization, it is important to take the time to identify current challenges and potential changes. We have identified multiple opportunities in improving supply chain processes by leveraging existing MEDITECH functionality, and updating associated procedures. Here are three key areas:

1. Inventory Management – There are multiple options in creating an inventory structure in MEDITECH to support hospital requirements. The inventory structure is important because it affects how stock items are ordered, replenished, and charged. There is hierarchy of main inventory that connects with either sub, or department type inventories. Sub inventories, allow the hospital to keep a stock item as inventory until utilized. Department inventories, charge a department when a stock item is transferred from the main inventory. Automating this process minimizes manual steps and allows teams to use mobile devices to support inventory management that integrate with standard MEDITECH routines. To support hospital Inventory Management processes, inventory related dictionaries should be closely monitored and maintained.
2. Surgical Services/Materials Management Integration – MEDITECH provides standard integration between Surgical Services and Materials Management. This integration is important in helping support one of the largest supply consumers within a hospital, and create inventories specifically for Surgical Services. This key integration point within the MEDITECH system provides significant value to hospitals, and can be automated based on inventory par levels and current amount on hand.
3. Order/Invoice Reconciliation – Reconciling invoices against orders is an important workflow, but can be time consuming. MEDITECH provides a standard integration for this process. Hospitals can determine an acceptable variance in parameters, however, variances outside the approved amount are captured on an exception report. Lastly, there is a routine “external offset” to remove orders with receipts, but no invoice that appear on a monthly accrual report. In most cases, the invoice is directly entered in AP and not matched using MM/AP routine. This integration provides a more efficient process to complete reconciliation, along with supporting routines for monitoring and reporting.

Though it can be quite challenging, offering your team the tools to improve Inventory Management, Order Reconciliation and the ability to utilize Surgical and Material Integrations, can significantly increase accuracy and efficiency. Our team has the experience and expertise to determine optimization opportunities, as well as, steps to approach, and execute them successfully.

Depending on the scope of your Supply Chain assessment, these projects typically involve a quick two-week process (off and on-site) where our team will review your current system configuration, data, system utilization, conduct series of interviews with key users and then provide both short-term and long-term recommendations for optimization. Included in this process is involvement with leadership so we better understand the hospital's objectives for Supply Chain.

For more details on the Supply Chain assessment CereCore provides, you can download our solution overview here. To start a conversation or schedule a meeting, please email us at info@cerecore.net or call us at 855.276.9112.