Excerpts from the interview with Louis Fierens, Senior VP – Supply Chain & Capital Projects Management.
Approach to supply chain management:
"The cornerstone of everything that we do in supply chain is built around standardization of processes and data, creating market transparency and engaging stakeholders. We aspire to be a clinically driven supply chain, and the Trinity Health strategic sourcing process model is especially sensitive to clinical outcomes and impact on the care delivery process. So I would suggest that our approach is built on balancing the elements of quality, service, technology and price – much like most supply chain organizations."
Technologies utilized to organize supply chain transparency throughout all the different facilities:
"Our Supply Chain Information System is our backbone, it's our common item file, common supplier file, a single instance of supply chain supporting the enterprise. We have centralized requisition processing so our procurement all sits in one location nationally, processing orders. We have been implementing the system over the last three years in all our hospitals, and it will be completely installed by the end of the calendar year. We use handheld scanning to monitor inventory locations and automate our requisition and receiving processes. One of the things that's different from a manufacturing environment is we don't have predictable volume or frozen master schedule. This is because when you walk in the door of the hospital, to a large extent we don't know exactly what you're going to need. Our focus is around monitoring consumption as opposed to trying to forecast demand. Right now, we're working to move our consumption point of inventory closer to the patient bed. Overall, it's about creating transparency around spend, so we can better focus on higher areas of opportunity and ensure that every transaction that we have throughout the enterprise is documented, bringing accountability to the effectiveness of it. It creates an information foundation around supply standardization, as well as in a more mature state, allows us to link with the clinical system to understand the supply impact on outcomes."
Source: "Mission-driven Supply Management," Inside Supply Management, September 2008, Vol. 19, No. 9: pp. 26-29.