Success Story – Increased Sixty Percent Efficiency in Purchase Orders

Company Description:

Upper Midwest hospital system with 7 Hospitals and many clinics, 400+ eProcurement Requesters

Problem:

The hospital systems was using high priority requisitions as a means for requesters to request product that was needed within 24 hours, often times for next day patient procedures. There were 3 main issues that the hospital system was encountering.

1. An increased risk to patients if the correct product was not delivered when and where it was needed
2. The Purchasing staff was spending upwards of 45 minutes working each high priority requisition
3. The focus on high priority requisitions was causing other day-to-day functions to slip

Belmero Approach:

To ensure that the correct product was delivered timely and to the correct location the entire process needed to be analyzed starting from the point the nurses/requesters entered the requisition to the delivery of the product. This required several key pieces of information be provided by the requesters before the requisition was submitted. To address the amount of time spent by the Purchasing Staff we had to streamline the process and utilize several delivered tools to notify the purchasing staff when an action needed to be performed. This approach was taken so that the Purchasing staff no longer needed to search for the high priority requests, track down the requesters when additional information was needed or notify the requesters once their product was confirmed by the Vendor. The goal was to automate as many of the manual processes as possible, provide notifications only when an action was needed and increase the accurateness of the information. Since this was a cross module issue Belmero provided liaison services between IT, functional support staff and Business.

Results:

With a tightening budget, the hospital system needed to optimize the process without increasing head count. The High Priority Requisition process was analyzed and streamlined to capture pertinent information to ensure that the correct product was delivered. This reduced the number of times that purchasing staff had to call the requesters for additional information by 85%. Additionally, the amount of time spent by the purchasing staff to process and order the product was reduced from 45 minutes to 5 minutes, a sixty percent increase in efficiency for purchase orders. This time savings allowed the purchasing staff to focus on other functions and responsibilities. This is a perfect example of how Belmero can take an inefficient process, delivered tools/functionality, work with IT, the functional support team and the Business Managers to improve a process without increasing headcount so that our clients can get a bigger ROI from their PeopleSoft ERP solution. [signature]