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SPANNING THREE DECADES OF VALUE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

July 30, 2002

THERE IS POWER IN DATA AND INFORMATION,

BUT THERE IS GOLD TO BE FOUND IN

SUPPLY CHAIN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

“Knowledge Management is About Better Connections

Between People, Content, and Expertise”

                                                                                                ISCM

Robert T. Yokl, President, The HCP Group, Ltd. 

Things change, people change and processes are reinvented in all healthcare supply chain organizations. So how do you capture the right information, from the right people, at the right time, interpret it and share it organization-wide?  For example, I once had a senior buyer reporting to me who was an expert in MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) purchases and who could find anything anybody ever wanted or needed with same day delivery if necessary.  But all of this experience, expertise and know-how was lost when he retired from my healthcare organization, because all his expertise went undocumented and was lost forever. Xerox had this same challenge with their service engineers who repaired copiers, but solved it with a knowledge management system called EUREKA, which allows their service engineers to capture service solutions on-line, then share these problems, symptoms and services solutions with their peers and in seven languages globally.  As these examples demonstrate, without a disciplined knowledge management model, data and information that is critical to your current and future success will be lost forever.

The Difference Between Data, Information and Knowledge Management 

To understand the concept of knowledge management we must first understand the difference between data, information and knowledge.  Data is a record of transactions, such as purchases that capture product descriptions, manufacturers, prices, product numbers and quantities ordered, that have no intrinsic value in and of themselves.  Information is data that has been put in context, such as 80% of your purchases are under $1,000 dollars.  Knowledge is insight, interpretation and sharing of data and information that has been cleansed, organized, classified, objectified, and data mined to create value, such as predicting when a stockout will occur on an inventory item.  Our goal then should be to marry up data and information in a knowledge management repository to capture solutions in a user-friendly environment.

The Role of Information Technology in Knowledge Management 

Information technology has given us the tools to capture, compile, analyze and share data and information on all of our supply chain operations’ best practices, rules and procedures. This is due to the development of Internet applications, data warehouses and data mining software that acts as an enabler to store, retrieve and distribute supply chain information that is mission critical to our healthcare organizations.  As an illustration, one of our clients (a 400 hospital consortium) has deployed an Internet application developed by HCP that provides decision support, project management and a data warehouse to evaluate and select best value products, services and technologies, share best practices, benchmarks, pricing and data mine for savings opportunities at their shareholder’s healthcare organizations.  This creates a virtual community of value practitioners who can retrieve, interpret and share knowledge that just a few years ago was only a dream, not a reality.   

Creating Value With Knowledge Management