Score Savings, Stop Stressing:
A Smart Workplan for the Win

Lauren Campbell, Director of Product Development, BroadJump

An unorganized and inefficient workplan is like a team that can’t break its losing streak – there is little success and no relief in sight. What moves the needle? What is your gameplan for ensuring your team achieves its goals? The current supply chain workplan is outdated and impractical in accounting for all the factors needed to accurately prioritize ongoing projects. Plus, current workplans must be maintained manually, as opposed to being updated automatically with your most recent data. Your team needs a solution that considers all pertinent information for smart prioritization, using market intelligence and advanced algorithms.

Imagine if instead of working through endless excel sheets, you had actionable intelligence at the click of a button. An automated, intelligent workplan takes the projects your team is already working on or has performed in the past and reduces any duplicated work. It accounts for data aggregation and standardization, purchase history, and operational statistics to prioritize the work so you know exactly how to maximize your time and effort investment for the biggest return.

Drowning Out the Crowds

As a provider, the scope of so many individual factors can be overwhelming and unproductive. The standard practice of sorting projects simply by contract expiration dates results in overlooking prime opportunities for those that do little for the bottom line. You can spend your entire day scouring thousands of data points without much to show for it, and the vast workload mixed with excessie project notes in various places and with multiple methods makes it difficult to stay on track. In order to “cut through the noise”, you need a solution that can best manage all the decisions that have relative impact on all non-labor expenses, meaning you can determine which has the greatest impact and makes the best use of limited resources. It starts with prioritizing your projects with a smart, digital workplan that uses data to weigh the urgency of your initiatives.

This standardized workflow process is necessary in staying on track and organized. In the same way that a a football team follows a playbook during games, your supply chain and sourcing teams need their own playbook for tracking initiatives and maintaining best practices.

Building a Strategic Gameplan with Actionable Intelligence

Building a winning gameplan requires a mix of operational insight – market analytics, data intelligence, sourcing expertise, reporting performance KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), opportunity scoring, price trends, and user preferences. Start with aggregated, standardized data from all sources, including pharmacy wholesalers, specialty pharmacy, EHR, ERP, accounts payable, and multiple facilities and locations. Utilize a platform with built-in analytics applications that provide KPIs on the factors that drive supply costs up, like price changes, utilization changes, and new product introductions, as well as the ability to compare your exact pharmaceutical or supply purchae pricing to your peers. The added analytics information is essential for your smart workplan to suggest the initiatives that hae the greatest impact on achieving your goals and improving your bottom line.

In addition to the contributing data from a team of analytics applications, you need relevant information from your previous project history and insights on the actions that have worked best in obtaining savings. Connecting all this information in one centralized location narrows your focus for optimal performance.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

The winningest sports teams in history all have one thing in common: Teamwork. Collaboration and communication are key when it comes to achieving and maintaining success. With healthcare supply chain and sourcing teams, taht means everyone is on the same page working with the tried-and-true methods that reap the greatest rewards. You need to know what projects your peers are working on, which suppliers they have had success working with, what tactics your suppliers have used in recent contract, rebate, and pricing negotiations, and which approaches have been the most successful.

Effective communication on projects across your entire organization makes all the difference. It allows you the ability to decipher and be alerted to market shifts, whether manufacturer or category related, based on new pricing, contracts, rebates, and more. An intelligent workplan with a built-in collaboration portal streamlines your processes, improving your team’s functional and financial effectiveness. This kind of digital platform transforms the way your team operates on a day-to-day basis by giving you back valuable resource time and ensuring your collective efforts are producing results.

A Playbook for Success

When you think about how you prioritize your day, is it based on realizing the greatest opportunities or putting out the biggest fires? In most cases, supply chain and sourcing teams don’t have the time or resources available to dedicate toward achieving their overall goals. They are too busy swapping substitutions, making up for lost yards, and fighting penalties to get to the endzone. That’s why a smart, digital workplan is crucial – instead of wondering what to work on next, a digital platform provides you with a customized, actionable workplan that is easy to understand and requires no additional analytical work on your part. It’s a playbook for success that does the work for you, so you can spend less time looking for opportunities and more time executing them.