He’s a strong advocate of keeping processes as simple and streamlined as possible.
“I think of our supply chain as a three-legged stool,” Bakelaar says. “We have Workday, which is our ERP, we have our primary distributor that we get the majority of our supplies from, and then we have our group purchasing organization. Those three legs are what we try to leverage from a technology, process and workflow perspective. We do our best not to add more technology, interfaces or systems unless it’s for one of the three legs of the stool. We find that additional technology and integrations just add a lot of complexity.”
Bakelaar also advises health systems to re-evaluate their workflows if they don’t fit neatly into an ERP solution.
“I think the mistake people continually make is that they want to change the technology to fit their business process. Changing business processes is hard, and telling a vendor to change their software can be much easier,” he says. “But I’ve always taken the position that it’s better to change the business process. It’s a good opportunity to evaluate processes and work teams.”
Finding Supply Chain Efficiencies During a Healthcare Merger
Healthcare mergers can often introduce unwieldy processes, but when Corewell Health emerged from the integration of Michigan-based Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health in 2022, the newly formed health system earned the No. 2 spot in Gartner’s 2023 rankings of the top 25 healthcare organizations in supply chain management.
Combining warehouse management systems and ERP integration were key to Corewell Health’s success.
“We had to resolve a lot of issues before we went live with our ERP system, and our success was driven by the prep work,” Director of Analytics Danish Abbasi says. “Our primary goals were to ensure that patient care was not impacted, realize a smooth integration and improve processes, and we achieved that together as a team.”
CONSIDER: How can health systems tackle cyber resilience in supply chain management?
Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Andrea Poulopoulos agrees.
“It has definitely been a journey over the past couple of years,” she says. “Our legacy teams did a great job working with one another to reach application selection consensus. As a result, we’ve been able to eliminate redundant technology, reduce cost and drive workflow efficiencies.”
Corewell Health uses Workday for many of its supply chain management processes, and it has added solutions from Tableau for data visualization to focus on data-driven decision-making. As a major indicator of success, Corewell Health’s [pending vendor payments have decreased from $30 million to $14.6 million, improving supplier relationships.
Poulopoulos has advice for combining two organizations’ IT systems.
“You need to remove your biases during the technology assessment process,” she says. “We had to be very objective when evaluating solutions. It wasn’t a matter of deferring to best-in-breed technology. We had to be good stewards of the organization’s dollars and determine what we needed.”
link