I’m not hearing a lot of supply chain professionals talking about employing scorecards to translate their strategies into accountable and measurable progress. Anyone who is a member of a Fantasy Football League will know what I’m talking about.
My son, who is an avid Fantasy Football aficionado, just showed me his Fantasy Football League’s website that has hundreds of performance metrics (stats of league members’ favorite NFL players on their roster) that are tracked weekly to determine who is winning in their league. The website even has a link to Yahoo Sports that automatically downloads every player’s statistics that played that week, along with their season averages. What is amazing is there’s very little manual labor involved with this league’s weekly scorecard, which is available 24/7 for league members to review.
I was blown away by the sophistication of this scorecard. It struck me that supply chain professionals can use these same Fantasy Football League concepts in building, managing and maintaining their supply chain scorecards: performance metrics, visualization, and automation to make your job easier.
A scorecard (printed or computerized) by definition is a visual representation of selected performance metrics that are measured against a predetermined standard or goal. For example, monthly savings vs. monthly savings goal; supply expense as a ratio of your hospital’s operating expenses or revenues vs. a predetermined standard or FTEs vs. FTEs budgeted. You name it and it can be tracked, trended and measured with a scorecard.
The beauty of employing a scorecard to measure your supply chain performance is that it is easy to design, easy to understand and easy to manage and maintain once it is put in place. At my firm we design all of our software products to include automated scorecards, since they make complicated data visually — at one glance.
For instance, our new CliniTrack™ Clinical Supply Trial Manager software has two dashboards: one to track requisitions from submission to approval and the other to track all of our clients’ value analysis projects. Best of all, the scorecards are automatically updated in real-time (without human intervention) from the data housed in our CliniTrack™ engine.
The supply chain game is getting harder and harder due to the demands of the new healthcare economy. Why not make your job a whole lot easier with scorecards that will enable you to record, document and measure the progress you are making against your strategic goals? By doing so you can be virtually guaranteed that everyone in your supply chain organization will be held accountable for your supply chain success.
Robert T. Yokl
Chief Value Strategist
Strategic Value Analysis® in Healthcare
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