Strategic Value Analysis In Healthcare

5 Ways To Break Through Your Supply Savings Barriers

If you Recognize, Confront and Overcome Your Savings Barriers, Your Savings Will Then Cascade Like A Waterfall!

We all get stuck in a rut with our supply chain career when we are confronted by change resisters, idea killers and bad karma all around us. It’s often an uphill battle just to get your savings initiatives on everyone’s radar screen, especially with your hospital, system or IDN’s executive management team. It doesn’t need to be that way. If you recognize, confront and overcome your savings barriers, your savings will then cascade like a waterfall! Here are five ways to get you unstuck:

1. Dismantle all product evaluation and value analysis committees that aren’t meeting their savings and quality objectives and replace them with value teams (for more information on how value teams work to reduce cost, click on my White Paper “Strategic Value Analysis: Savings Beyond Price” at my website www.strategicvalueanalysis.com)

2. Turn off all negativity by having a continuous campaign to educate your executive management and department heads and managers that supply savings is primarily their responsibility. They prepare their own supply budgets (you don’t) and they provide the specifications for their products, services and technologies (you don’t), so they need to make the savings happen too.

3. Search for champions within your healthcare organization that will defend and support your supply savings ideas along with you. You’ll be surprised they are everywhere. Going it alone can be very lonely and forlorn path to take that can lead to despair.

4. Discover new ways to save money, like reverse auctions, functional analysis, freight management, or recycling programs that can get you excited about your job again. There is nothing like new challenges to get you energized to save money.

5. Exercise your authority and influence to get your case for saving money heard at the highest levels of our organization. You have more power and influence than your think. In my day in the trenches, I even made presentations to my hospital’s board of directors to make sure that they understood that saving money was everybody’s business.

On the other hand, you can ignore these five ideas that I have given you to get you unstuck and break through your savings barriers and stay in the rut you dug for yourself. I can assure you that this attitude will only lead to feeling trapped in a dead-end job full of frustration and hopelessness. It doesn’t need to be that way. Supply chain management is a wonderful and fantastic career if you only take action to get unstuck when change resisters, idea killers and bad karma come your way.