Business Challenge
Rather than owning the supply of medical implants on hand, most hospitals opt to take inventory on consignment from the manufacturer. In this situation, the implant manufacturer uses its network of highly compensated / skilled sales representatives to manage the consigned stock at hospital sites.
These representatives own a wide breadth of responsibilities ranging from surgeon assistance in the operating room to inventory counts in the stock room. As with most implant manufacturers, this vendor requires that its sales representatives conduct inventory counts using traditional bar code scanners. This process is time-consuming and manual providing the sales representatives with a strong disincentive towards taking inventory. The result are cycle-counts that occur infrequently and lack the requisite accuracy.
This barrier to collecting reliable, timely inventory data from the field creates the following downstream inefficiencies for the manufacturer and its customers:
- Out-of-stocks
- Product loss
- Lost sales productivity
- Low inventory turns
- Product expiration
- Patient misidentification
- Delayed invoicing
- Customer dissatisfaction
Requirements
- Quick and accurate counts of inventory consigned to hospitals
- Inventory data provided in real-time / near real-time to existing ERP applications for invoicing and replenishment
- Positive ROI / payback in less than 1 year
Solution
- RFID-tagged inventory at hospitals and regional distribution centers
- Handheld RFID readers used by field sales representatives that wirelessly communicate with centralized web services
- Centralized web services that distribute policies to and aggregate events from the field
- Adapter for data share with existing ERP and legacy applications
- Central administration console that provides easy-to-use:
- Role-based user management
- Tag commissioning
- Policy / event management that matches existing business policies
- Alert management
- Graphing / reporting / audit trail
Benefits
- Lowers the time required for inventory cycle-counts at hospitals by approximately 75%
- Provides near real-time inventory data to ERP systems for more accurate and timely invoicing, forecasting, and replenishment
- Reduces out-of-stocks and shrinkage
- Increases inventory turns
- Provides mechanism for tracing expired / recalled products in the field