A national healthcare company was experiencing problems with demand planning, purchasing and utilization of data. Liberty developed a roadmap to improve inventory, productivity, and service levels and established a PMO to execute the strategy.

Leadership of a large national healthcare company with extensive distribution operations, wanted to improve their supply chain operations. They specifically were focused on reducing operating inventory levels, improving inconsistent service levels and improving resource productivity by eliminating manual non-value added labor hours. Key pain points included the lack of cross-functional processes and interaction, no formal demand planning processes or tools, limited utilization of data, and purchasing’s limited use of functionality within SAP. The company established inventory reduction and service level improvement targets but were failing to realize results.

Liberty provided a rapid assessment of the client’s demand planning processes, purchasing and inventory operations, order management and vendor performance. The assessment included utilization of applications and data to make purchasing decisions.

An improvement roadmap was developed addressing demand planning and purchasing behaviors and rules, inventory practices, key metrics and scorecards, data utilization and integration, SAP optimization, resource training, and cross-department alignment on inventory processes and impact transparency.

To execute the roadmap, Liberty established a PMO consisting of 6 work streams with monthly improvement targets. An agile project management approach was utilized to address key business issues, lack of existing processes, limited access to data and information, and communicate near-term objectives and progress.

Working closely with the client’s team, Liberty was able to quickly identify and implement improvements that led to inventory reduction while improving the performance (people, process and technology) of the purchasing and inventory operations. Results delivered include:

• • • • Reduced Days on Hand of Inventory by 2.5 days resulting in freeing up over $22M in capital
      • Improved service levels to 99.1%
      • Refined purchasing processes and toolsets to continue inventory improvement