Yesterday I mentioned that if a vital piece of medical equipment or supplies goes missing, is delivered to the wrong location, or is damaged, there can be serious consequences. When it comes to selecting suppliers, healthcare providers (hospitals, universities, clinics, and so on) do factor in price, but quality, service and reliability are more important.
The information systems medical suppliers use to run their operations contain a wealth of data that can be harnessed and analyzed to identify opportunities for innovation and improving process efficiencies.
BusinessPlanning and Analytics platforms allow a medical supplier to extract that data and analyze every aspect of their supply chain and distribution network to improve sales, forecasting, demand planning, sourcing, rebates, production and distribution.
By analysing non-financial and financial data, medical suppliers can identify growth areas by product, geography and customer. This may lead to questions such as:
To meet growth and demand, will new facilities need to be established or existing ones expanded?
Sales and inventory data can be analyzed to identify slow moving products or products the medical supplier may be overstocking due to decreased demand.
Where are the potential bottlenecks in distribution and delivery that may impact service and reliability?
Supply and distribution channels vary considerably by geography, product type, local regulatory approvals, commercial relationships, and other factors. With BI and planning platform , you'll have a greater insight into the following questions:
- What are the costs for each link of the supply-chain?
- What factors contribute to those costs?
- Are shipping and transportation costs too high?
Having, greater insight and visibility into what is happening in the supply chain can facilitate greater collaboration with customers and partners. This collaboration will lead to the reduced likelihood of stock outages and surpluses.
The Right Business Planning and Analytics Tool
The supply-chain for a medical supplier can be a complex environment with data buried in multiple systems. You need a reporting and analytics tool that can extract that data easily, from a variety of system and present it in a manner that is user friendly and offers you the ability to drill-down and reveal the underlying issues as as create financial statements and budgets.
To learn how to leverage your ERP & CRM data to address critical success factors in the medical supplies industry, please download our free ebook by clicking the button below:
