14 Dec 11

The evolution of order processing - Part 2 Misadventures in Technology

Generally regarded as being behind other sectors in the automation of supply chain process (consumer goods and technology for example), the time is right for healthcare companies to follow the leaders in lean practise. 

In the past healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical supply companies built or bought systems to automate the processing of huge numbers of orders received by fax, email or web-form.  Unfortunately, the burden placed on staff who manually enter these hundreds of thousands of orders every year has simply shifted to burden staff in other areas of the organisation.

Technology bought in to automate large parts of the manual entry process has to be maintained and that means employing new people with new skills, or training existing people who already have their own jobs to do.  In most cases systems will need tailoring to fit the organisation's requirements, creating a set of unique leg-mounted skills that sometimes walk elsewhere.  And when the business peaks or troughs these companies find themselves either expensively over resourced or under resourced with no quick remedy within reach.

Healthcare, medical supply and pharmaceutical companies could move ahead of the current leaders in the order automation stakes.  The most advanced technology allows them to move straight from manual processing to a multi-tenanted cloud-based solution where the rents are reasonable and maintenance and security are all taken care of.

Even companies who have made a significant investment building their own solutions can draw a line in the sand and move forward using software as a service (SaaS).  They can begin to onboard and service new customers and new markets using the SaaS model, without upsetting the status quo.  The same goes for those who outsource order processing automation to vendors whose one size fits all solution leaves many healthcare customers out in the cold.

The cloud route turns order automation into a low key, low risk, low overhead process. Global companies with revenues greater than £500M typically save £1M every year using automation to eliminate errors and reduce staff costs.