From procuring PPE amid a pandemic to achieving the “perfect order,” Temple Health’s Director of Systems and Measurements Madhu Pillai talked about the Philadelphia health system’s efforts to achieve contract compliance in Prodigo’s recent webinar, Driving Compliance Through Your Spend Management Platform.
Before the pandemic, Temple Health thought it had a good crisis plan and an adequate inventory of critical supplies. But in the early weeks of the pandemic, Pillai’s team, like most health systems across the country, scrambled to buy as many masks and ventilators as possible to meet their escalating needs. Alternative vendors had to be identified, contracts had to be approved faster than ever, and Temple Health had to be on guard for fraudulent companies promising supplies they could not deliver.
A year later, Pillai said Temple Health, like most of the industry, has moved away from lean supply chain management – at least for some categories of medical supplies – and predicts that industry shift will be permanent.
As that shift occurs, it becomes more important than ever for health systems to carefully manage their supply contracts to make sure vendors are meeting expectations on cost, quality, and delivery.
Temple Health has been making significant improvements to its supply chain management systems and processes for more than a decade. Leveraging Prodigo’s Marketplace requisitioning platform, Temple had been able to reduce special request lines from over 35% to less than 6% – well below the 29% industry benchmark tracked by Prodigo Solutions. Two years ago, a need to effectively enforce contract terms and pricing throughout the contract lifecycle led Temple to implement Prodigo’s Contract Navigator solution.
“We had good contracts in place with good spend coverage but were not able to make sure that the people buying supplies were able to access the contracts and able to find the products that they needed at the correct price negotiated,” Pillai said.
By adding Contract Navigator, Temple Health was able to syndicate more than 400 contracts covering close to 250,000 SKUs into their Marketplace requisitioning workstream, which integrates into the health system’s PeopleSoft ERP system. They were also able to easily add new vendor catalog items and prices in a matter of days. And because Prodigo’s platform is ERP agnostic, it is able to work seamlessly with all of Temple Health’s existing applications and infrastructure.
The system gives Temple Health transparency in purchasing activity across all categories of spend. Leaders can track trends and key metrics which drive corrective actions based on insight from live contract and transactional dashboards.
Contract Navigator is helping Temple Health get closer to achieving “the perfect order,” – the holy grail of supply chain purchasing. Pillai defines the perfect order as “lights out,” – an order that can be entirely managed by the purchasing system without a person at a desk intervening to place the order or to manage match exceptions downstream.
Pillai said the only way to achieve the perfect order is to have a system that provides easy access to the right information – right item, right source, right price – at the point of demand. “By standardizing the ordering process, we are making it easy for requesters to make the right decision.”
Prodigo Solutions is honored to work closely with health systems like Temple Health that have trusted us to integrate our technology platforms into their supply chain modernization initiatives in order to improve and refine their supply chain management and procurement system. We are thankful to Mr. Pillai for spending the time to thoroughly explain the benefits achieved through our partnership.