RFID is the Cure - part 2
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Sun, Apr 26, 2009
I am hoping to see a few of you down at RFID Journal Live in Orlando this week. I head down tomorrow, but wanted to finish up on the discussion started last week on the healthcare consignment supply chain. As a refresher of last week's blog, we used the metaphor of a train to illustrate the medical device value chain.
The various cars on the train can be supported and enhanced with RFID solutions. Those solutions are:
- Consignment Supply Chain Solutions: an RFID tunnel, improving accuracy as well as velocity. Thirty minutes of labor slashed to under a minute with much higher accuracy.
- Distribution Automated Solutions: Portals at the dock doors could yield to RFID tables at the smaller field offices while reps in their cars could use an RFID hand held reader to download and accurate inventory back to the central database.
- Point of Care Solutions: While hand held readers will fit in some instances where employees are in the field, RFID medical cabinets are taking on growing popularity on the hospital floors as they can give up to the minute accounting of what products are out at the edge...closest to the customers.
These individual solution sets offer us the tools to cure what ails the consignment supply chain within healthcare. They offer us the ability to automate, and it is that automation that relieves the pressure that slackening growth has created. This pressure has always been there but with growth down 50% over the past three years, the hospitals and point of care locations are looking for areas to squeeze cost out of their business. Consignment "Floor stock" is a cost center to the hospitals as it takes up valuable real estate in a busy hospital setting and as it piles up, since that is what happens when the manufacturer does not know what they need so they send "more". It also makes the location of the needed product in the growing inventory, particularly frustrating.
So as this pressure to squeeze cost builds, it is forced down the value train and touches all the stakeholders in distribution and manufacturing. Currently the chain of events sends people scrambling to inventory the stock, pull it back in from the floor and the trunks all in an attempt to achieve a thorough accounting of what is on board the train. Automation would solve this wild scramble through every car of the train.
The tagging of these consigned assets would take place at the manufacturer because the business case exists based on velocity and accuracy. The rest of the train cars ride for free and gain the visibility that is so lacking currently. It is a complimentary situation up and down the track and that is why ODIN has focused on and has become a leader in the vertical.
If you are a passenger on the healthcare value train, do not sit idly by and fail to recognize the power of RFID for your business and your very career. Adoption throughout the value train will take a bit of time, but it is only a question of when. Give us a call at ODIN to discuss how RFID will fit into your plans to improve your company's velocity, accuracy and visibility. It also will improve your value, not only in the eyes of your company, but in your industry...and that can only lead to a brighter future in every way.