What Can Other Industries Teach You?
I always keep my eye on what other industries are doing related to supply chain management to see what I can learn from them. Especially since most of our supply chain innovations (MMIS, ERP, Just-in-Time, spend managers, LEAN, Six Sigma, etc.) have been swiped from other industries. This is something you should be doing too to keep your creative ideas percolating. To save you time I have listed five ideas below that other industries are focusing on in 2010 with their supply chain management:
- Creating shared services centers for material management and finance, to reduce business processes, control of spend and improve working capital.
- Training material management staff in negotiation, finance, analytics, quality, and lean where there was more value needed from their current employees.
- Outsourcing of non-critical operations as long as it wasn’t core to a supply chain activity.
- Working with suppliers to identify lower-cost-alternative (i.e. value analysis) products, services and technologies.
- Developing green packaging and re-furbishing products to avoid waste going into landfills.
I realize at first glance that some if these ideas might not appear to you to be translatable to the healthcare supply chain, but I see that every one of these ideas to be transferable. For example, I know of a number of healthcare organizations that have centralized their material management and payables departments under one roof to improve their efficiency. So you can cut and paste the ideas you like to fit your own supply chain environment. You don’t need to implement in whole cloth as they are stated herein. Your goal should be as Tom Peters, the management guru once said, is to “Steal from the best with pride”, since most of our healthcare best supply chain ideas have come from other industries anyway.
