Healthcare Value Analysis Hospital Consulting and Benchmarking for Supply Chain Savings

I’ve just been told by Robert W. that we are now in beginning our seventh year (6-years - 282 articles) of publishing our Savings Beyond Price™ E-Newsletter which is a milestone for us.

Although our e-newsletter ain’t broken, we have revised, refined and reinvented this e-newsletter about 14 times over this same time period. The truth is we never stop trying to make it better (same goes for our services and software solutions)!

Is this the same philosophy that you have with your supply value analysis program, to make it better even if “it ain’t broken”? If you don’t have this philosophy, you are missing a big opportunity to make your job easier, have more fun and improve your value analysis teams’ productivity.

This statement is especially accurate now that the latest technologies (dashboards, software and the internet) enable us ALL to do things better, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

So don’t wait for your supply value analysis program to be broken. Fix it anyway! You can then reap the rewards brought by using the new technologies, systems, software and models and you will move your value analysis team(s) to the next level of savings performance.

“Your Suppliers Can Contribute More Than You Think To Your Supply Value Analysis Program”

Most supply chain professionals keep their suppliers at arms length and in the dark on their purchasing decisions. This is because they have been taught that if they divulge too much information on their purchases to their suppliers, their hand (as in the game of poker) becomes weaker.

I used to think this same way when I was a young MM, but I soon learned that my suppliers could contribute more than I thought to my supply value analysis program. In fact, with few exceptions, they always made me look like a superstar if I put them on the hot seat!

The first truth that you must internalize before you can have your suppliers contribute more to your supply value analysis program is that your “suppliers know more about their product lines than we ever will!”

Hospitals, systems and IDN, by my count, buy 18,000 to 52,000 products, services and technologies annually. Do you think you can become an expert on every one of them? I don’t think so…

This is where your suppliers come into the picture that live, breathe and are obsessed about what they are selling. They know the good, bad and ugly about their products, services and technologies and their competitors too! All you need to do is put them on the hot seat to have them contribute to your supply value analysis program.

I learned very early in my career that I couldn’t turn a supplier lose in my healthcare facility to seek out savings opportunities if I still wanted to be employed at the end of the week. But I did find that if I put my suppliers on the “Hot Seat” I could use their knowledge, experience and corporate talent to my advantage -- very quickly.

The “hot seat” is a technique we have developed where we tell our clients to inform their supplier how much they want him or her to save (usually chosen through our benchmarking services) on their product, service or technology. We then tell our clients to ask their supplier to send in a team of experts from his corporation to thoroughly study the commodities they have targeted for savings.

The result: Our Clients have found hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the last few years by putting their suppliers on the “hot seat” thus contributing more to their supply value analysis programs.

You can have these same mega results by putting your suppliers on the “hot seat”. However you first must give your suppliers a target à to hit, or, you would just be giving your suppliers a hunting license and this wouldn’t give you the specific outcomes you are looking for.

What do your suppliers get for their efforts? They get more business, more loyalty and better and longer relationships with you. The way I look at it, your suppliers would be absolute crazy not to be put on the “hot seat” to gain these exclusive benefits that can’t be achieved by merely showing up routinely for a sales interview with you.

For Immediate Release

Contact: R.W. Yokl - 800-220-4271

One of the Most Important Supply Chain Tools to Be Introduced In the Past 25 Years According to a Leading Supply Chain Expert

Most healthcare organizations don’t have a utilization benchmarking tool to pinpoint, with certainty, where all their utilization savings reside, therefore are missing an extremely important power tool in their toolbox that can save them 3%, 6% or even 9% in their supply chain expenses. The good news! With SVAH’s new UTILIZER™ Utilization Management Dashboard, healthcare organizations will have the exact tool that they have been searching for to quickly and easily uncover all of their utilization misalignments.

Skippack, PA June 29, 2007 - We all know that a hammer is used to strike nails, a drill is use to make holes and a screw driver is use to turn screws. We call this using the precise tool for the right job to get the best results! Then why do healthcare organizations continue to use the wrong benchmarking tool to uncover their utilization savings? The answer is that we don’t always know there is a better tool to get the job done right the first time!

Robert T. Yokl, President of Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare (SVAH), an acknowledged expert in supply chain management, recalls talking to a healthcare supply chain manager a few months ago who told him that he was working with three databases (a spend manager, analytics manager and clinical manager), but still couldn’t uncover his hospital’s utilization misalignments. While SVAH’s own measurements showed however that this hospital had $4.2 million in utilization misalignments that were invisible to this supply chain manager. “This is the quandary that too many healthcare supply chain professionals face today, how to move to the next level of savings performance”.

More importantly Yokl states, “If a healthcare organization doesn’t have a utilization benchmarking tool to pinpoint, with certainty, where all their utilization savings reside, they are missing an extremely important power tool in their toolbox that can save them 3%, 6% or even 9%.”

“When you consider that a hospital, system or IDN can have 18,000 to 48,000 or more products (in 176 categories of purchase) in their MMIS system, where do supply chain professionals get started probing for these hidden savings?”, Yokl asks.

“The good news” Yokl predicts, “is that with SVAH’s new UTILIZER™ Utilization Management Dashboard healthcare organizations will have the exact tool that they have been searching for to quickly and easily uncover all of their utilization misalignments.”

Over the last seven years SVAH has conducted hundreds of utilization benchmarking studies for hospitals, systems and IDNs employing their own proprietary utilization dashboard which has identified close to a half a billion dollars in utilization misalignments for SVAH’s clients.

SVAH has now decided, after much internal debate, to make available their proprietary utilization dashboard to the marketplace as a monthly subscription service. This is because they now believe that periodic utilization studies aren’t a timely or effective way to manage a multi-million dollar supply chain business.

“We believe that a much better way, after we have repeatedly observed that our client’s utilization patterns are changing so rapidly (in less than three months in some cases), is to provide our clients with real-time access to mission critical and actionable information.”

This then is the genesis and the reason for SVAH introducing its new UTILIZER™ Utilization Management dashboard which Yokl believes,” Is one of the most important supply chain tools to be introduced in the past 25 years.”

Yokl says, “that the UTILIZER™ Utilization Management Dashboard will be provided as a subscription service on a fixed monthly fee basis (with a 30 day cancellation for any reason) to identify all of our client’s utilization savings.” SVAH will also provide its clients with unlimited phone and e-mail coaching and consulting to assist them in the implementation of the savings that have been identified with the UTILIZER™. SVAH will also provide them with quarterly refreshing of their purchasing data so clients will always be on top of their utilization misalignments. “The best feature of our UTILIZER™. subscription services,” Yokl states, “is that we can have new clients in the drivers seat within 30 days.”

About The Company: Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare, (SVAH) Skippack, Pennsylvania, is a software, training and consulting firm specializing in supply chain management. SVAH’s mission is to give our clients greater control over their supply chain by providing them with better information, better focus, and better systems so they can make better decisions on their second biggest expenditure.

For More Information Contact:

Robert W. Yokl

Vice President

Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare

800-220-4271

ryokl@strategicvalueanalysis.com

www.strategicvalueanalysis.com