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Did You Know...?
That Value Analysis Was Developed Back In the 1940's After World War II as a Way to Find Lower Cost but Higher Quality Alternative products and methods. This was Due to the Lack of Material Resources At The End of The War.
Savings Beyond Price -Weekly E-Zine- September 7, 2006
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
Greetings!
Are you experiencing feature creep?
How many of the products, services and technologies (PS&T) that you are buying are really new, original and innovative? Or, are they the recycled versions of PS&T’s that have been around for years with a new feature added here and there?
Feature Creep: Drapes, gowns, gloves, dressings, face masks, hand soaps, instrument milks, custom packs, instrument cleaners, safety syringes, and sterilizer controls are examples were ramped feature creep is occurring at your hospital.
My rule of thumb is that if a proposed PS&T can’t generate a 5% increase in savings or quality improvements then I shouldn’t be buying it just because it is pretty, unique or even cheaper than what I’m purchasing now.
Maybe it’s time for you to have a new rule to guide your purchase requests too.
Your Partner in Supply Chain Savings,
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
Are new strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques required to dig deeper and broader for supply chain savings?
Supply
Six
Sigma
Three Ways To Look For Actionable Business Intelligence In Your Data
“Many Hospitals Have Mastered The Art of Collecting Data, But Don’t Know What To Do With It.”
Supply chain professionals have spent millions on databases to collect their purchasing and inventory data to identify unfavorable patterns and trends, spot problems and to recognize new savings opportunities.
Now that hospitals systems and IDNs have mastered the art of collecting data, do they know what to do with it? If you fit into this category of not knowing what to do with your data, here are three ways to look for actionable business intelligence in your data:
1. Know What You Want
If you are going hunting you need to know what you are hunting for (i.e. bears, elks, reindeers or tigers) in order to find them. It’s the same with data mining, if you don’t know what you’re looking for with your data you might never find it.
As an illustration, if you are targeting to reduce your utilization misalignments (wasteful and inefficient consumption, misuse or misapplication of your PS&T) then you need to arrange your data by commodity groups that represent like things (i.e. custom packs, laundry chemicals, plumbing supplies, office supplies, etc.), not by vendor, manufacturer or customer. Otherwise, you will corrupt and distort your data with things that you aren’t looking for and have no interest in.
2. Organize In Clusters
You need to organize your data in smaller clusters of similar information, such as, utilization data, inventory data, orthopedics, pacemakers, stents, etc. Then you will be ready for the hunt, because you will now be working with data that has the same profile, characteristics and exclusivity. If you are working with the whole university of data that you have been collecting, you will only confound your data mining efforts.
3. Create a Dashboard
To observe patterns and trends over time a “dashboard” is the ideal tool to use for this purpose. It will automatically show you a stop action movie of how your targeted clustered data elements are reacting over time. For instance, are your surgeons utilizing more high impact orthopedic implants than you budgeted for this month or are more feature rich pacemakers being purchased than you anticipated?
All organizations are on overload with data. The amount of corporate storage space in terabytes of data is up 57%, just in the past three years, and is expected to rise by 430% by this year as reported by Fortune Magazine. But these statistics don’t mean that our data-sleuthing is getting any better.
To get better with your data-sleuthing you will need not only to master data collection, but to also master how to look for and find actionable business intelligence in your data.
DID YOU KNOW…
The Father of Six Sigma was Bill Smith, Vice President of Quality Assurance at Motorola in the 80s, who built a better mousetrap to improve any organization’s quality and reduce their cost at the same time.
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