It may be poor form to strut my newfound text-savviness after so long a blog hiatus, but since leaving my youngest child at college in August (whose imminent departure was the reason for the hiatus in the first place), I have learned to thumb my way around a QWERTY keyboard pretty darned well.
Yes, this former texting phobe has learned that, like a Skinner rat pounding for food pellets, my persistent thumb jabs also are rewarded: my daughter "talks" to me! I live for the tinny buzz that signals a new message of abbreviated words and punctuation smiley faces.
How does this relate to the hospital supply chain? Give me some latitude, and I think you'll see where I'm going.
So my youngest daughter and I are texters. My oldest daughter, a bona fide Facebook fanatic, uses the browser function of her cell phone to provide status updates to all her cyber-friends. And then there's my wife…she actually believes cell phones are meant for talking. Strange concept, I know.
Here's my dirty confession: since we each got cell phones at different times, our accounts were with different vendors. Yep. A brief lapse in paternal oversight, and they had effectively divided and conquered the family cell phone dollars! Not only did we use all these different features (billed for individually I might add), but we let the cellular carriers charge us top rate because I didn't bother to pool our accounts to get some purchasing power.
A colleague showed me this article about a poor dad whose teenage daughter was apparently trying to set the world record for number of texts sent in a month. She beat 10,000! The phone bill was $4,756.25!
My family never did that kind of damage, but you can be sure it snapped me to attention. I decided to take control by borrowing a page from the value analysis play book.
I brought together all the various bills from the phone carriers to analyze the expense. As expected, it was a lot!
Next, I sat down with my family to determine what everyone really needed to stay in the communication loop. Unlimited texting was a given. But my oldest daughter took one for the team, offering to give up the phone-based internet access and foregoing the real-time Facebook updates. Finally, it was clear that – with my wife as the only "talker" – we didn't need quite as many minutes as our plans allowed.
I had buy-in from my "users", I had the information I needed to shop around for a better deal, and so I started calling the cellular carriers to find the best price.
Cutting to the chase, we ended up with a family plan (one consolidated bill) where we could share voice minutes and take advantage of unlimited text messaging. Best yet, I got rid of the variable components of my monthly bills (mainly overage charges), and we're saving over 30 percent a month!
What's the moral here? For one, sometimes what we learn at work can help in our personal finances, too. More importantly, even though I let multiple vendors take advantage of my inattention to this expense for a brief period of time, it's never too late to take control.
The same basic rules apply in the hospital supply chain. To take control you need to be able to aggregate your spend data, analyze exactly where your dollars are going, sit down with your users to understand their needs (separating "nice to haves" from true needs), identify where you can standardize, and take this new purchasing power to market to negotiate the best price possible.
It works for a family with out of control phone bills, and I see it work every day for hospitals that decide to take control of their supply expenses.
Postscript: Last week, my younger daughter told me that she wanted a webcam for her laptop so she could Skype with her friends. It doesn't end, does it?
Comments