When the Going Gets Tough
Savings Beyond Price -Weekly eNewsletter – March 3, 2009
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
Greetings,
When the Going Gets Tough
Mikel Harry of the Six Sigma Management Institute tells us that when the going gets tough “Get back to basics. Re-examine everything you do and aim for breakthrough, not incremental, improvement. Have the courage to lead. You lead people to breakthrough, not manage them to breakthrough.” This is a winning formula in this recession!
Your healthcare organizations need your ideas, your expertise and your leadership to pull them through these uncertain times. If support from the top is lacking, then it’s even more important for you to lead the way in producing significant supply chain savings to right your boat.
I know that you are a regular reader of this e-newsletter and I’m preaching to the choir here. However, sometimes I think it’s important to remind you that almost nothing happens in your hospital, system or IDN without the leadership, involvement and know-how of supply chain management — making it happen.
You are an essential cog in the wheel that is required to keep your healthcare organization financially fit. So when the going gets tough I know that supply chain management will be part of the solution to these hard, tough problems we face today.
Your Partner In Savings Beyond Price™,
Robert T Yokl
Chief Value Strategist
Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare
1-800-220-4274
P.S. If you are really looking to “get unstuck” by traveling on new paths you will want to sign up for our latest webinar “Game Changer: 2009 Recession” where we will discuss this topic in detail.
P.P.S. I want to remind you to take a look at our latest version of our Utilizer Dashboard Software today. You have to see how this software tool will give you fast, efficient and easy to use low cost tool to help you drive out all of your savings beyond price then you need to take a look at the Utilizer today! You have to see the Utilizer to Believe it!
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Free Special Report
Supply Chain Utilization
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“Could a misalignment that comes with a simple (and less costly) fix be eating away at your savings?”
“Beware of Standardization”
“Managing utilization costs can save six to 10 percent on total supply expenditures”
LEAN Six Sigma: The Future is Now!
I had an electronic interview last week with Rick Dana Barlow Senior Editor of Hospital Purchasing News, for a future article on LEAN Six Sigma. This HPN interview got me thinking about how important it is for supply chain professionals to get on the LEAN Six Sigma train to meet their huge challenges over the next decade. Here are some of the ideas I spoke about in my HPN interview that I think you will find of interest.
First of all, Lean Management and Six Sigma are two different, but complementary methodologies, linked together into a unifying process called LEAN Six Sigma. LEAN Six Sigma has helped thousands of companies and hundreds of healthcare organizations dramatically improve their quality and increase their bottom line. What makes Lean management and Six Sigma different from TQM/CQI is their highly disciplined approach, their focus on waste and inefficiencies in the supply chain, speed and reducing the wide variances in products, services and processes employed and then controlling them – forevermore!
The healthcare supply chains are an ideal application for the Lean management or Six Sigma principles because they are transaction-based functions. For example, one big lesson we have learned from Toyota, the creators of Lean Management, is that purchasing departments can have as much as 50% non-value-added activities (i.e. activities customers wouldn’t pay for if they knew about them) that can be reduced by as much as a third by employing the Lean Management methodology. In this age of doing more with less we in supply chain management need to embrace these proven concepts so that we can optimize our resources just to keep pace with the changing healthcare marketplace.
Just as important, Lean Management and Six Sigma offers supply chain managers a disciplined, standardized, repeatable, and measurable system to reduce their cost and improve their quality. Its tenets can be applied to any initiative that a supply chain manager is asked to undertake (inventory management, PPIs, standardization, utilization, etc.) These concepts are really a magic bullet for supply chain managers to have even faster, better and more consistent supply chain operations.
I believe that the reason that more supply chain managers haven’t adopted these concepts is their belief that it will take too much of their time for them to learn, manage and sustain these new ways of doing things. In reality these concepts will actually save thousands of hours of year in reduced time, effort and expenses for supply chain managers. Education is the answer to moving material managers from a passive to an active role in adopting these new ways to managing their complex multi-million dollar supply chains.
That’s it for the short excerpt from my HPN interview, but it shouldn’t be the end of our dialog on this important topic. I would like to hear your ideas on this subject matter as well so we can get all supply chain professionals on the LEAN Six Sigma train.
