9 MAY 2024Structure supplier relationships beyond the traditional transactional models will be necessary that embraces new forms of governance and management to address these technology developments. After all, the technology coordination simply follows the examination of people and processes that need to be designed to create a demand driven framework. These new relationship models need to consider a deliberate alignment of both organization's strategic imperatives driven by a higher discipline of planning to be successful. Coordination among integration leaders, project managers, and a project team to advance initiatives associated with assimilating technology platforms will be just some of the synchronization resources essential to advancing these efforts.In the meantime, while healthcare systems work with industry partners on these longer term development efforts, they must in the short term, direct energy to best respond to supply gaps caused by numerous conditions such as pandemics, disasters or geo-political developments. Reexamining vendor risk management and backorder/recall programs is a proper starting place to start the improvement paths that will mitigate supply risks and strengthen the core activities in responding to acute or unplanned supply insufficiencies. Understanding the conditions that cause supply shortages will require access to these changing supplier conditions around the globe. Insight that runs deep among supplier tier levels that are dependent upon to produce a product will be crucial. Furthermore, addressing how best to digest this insight and respond within the healthcare system supply chain will require formulation of an operating decision-based model that efficiently decides the corresponding action to these impactful supply chain disruptions. Defining the type of talent needed to bolster these operations will have to be addressed immediately. Development of leading and lagging key performance indicators (KPIs) will provide the insight necessary to respond to trending or immediate supply control issues. Formal supply chain driven monthly supply and operational planning (S&OP) inside healthcare supply chains needs to be inserted as a means of standardizing information and planning activities for matching demand and supply. This process will require a higher level of analytical capability not usually found in healthcare supply chains today. The imperative will mandate statistical-based forecasts to better anticipate demand shifts that can be communicated with suppliers as input for their development of supply schedules.Clearly, we find a daunting journey ahead, but these long term and short term efforts will certainly be the course to follow and the call to action if we are serious about advancing our end to end supply chain in the future.
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