___________________________________________________________________________________________ Northside Hospital
that substitutes would not go on back order as well . Northside also dramatically increased the frequency of communications with key vendors and conducted ongoing usage reviews to predict future order patterns . Implementation of the new process resulted in an 81 percent improvement towards the fill rate target and performance has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels .
Category management clarity
“ Optimizing product mix and cost became increasingly difficult during the pandemic due to supply chain disruption . With a constantly changing product portfolio , Northside implemented an approach to manage supplies at a more granular level using a category management methodology similar to that found in the retail industry . Products were segmented into pre-defined categories based on common attributes such as end use , customer and supplier groupings . Northside utilizes a standard hierarchy of over 70 major categories to gain visibility into spend patterns , vendor performance and clinical preferences . Category analysis , which includes external and internal benchmarking , is the basis for the development of specific strategies aimed at optimizing individual category performance through the identification of opportunities for standardization , spend reduction , supplier optimization and risk mitigation . Opportunities are prioritized based on impact and feasibility and assigned to team members for implementation . scw-mag . com 57