The following paper presents a balanced scorecard for the supply chain management in a hospital. Hospitals strive to operate efficiently while providing the best patient care. By managing the supply chain strategically, hospitals can save costs, provide better patient care, better serve the demands of professional staff and also maintain a sound relationship with its suppliers. According to my understanding, the main goal of the hospital that I previously worked was not profitability, but to provide good patient care. Still, certain measures can be taken to save costs without sacrificing on the quality of care that patients receive. The main strategy of hospital`s supply chain is to provide excellent service, meet time sensitive demands of hospital supplies and reduce the operating and purchasing costs of supply chain.
Figure: A Supply Chain Balanced Scorecard Framework
Customer Perspective: The goal is to provide the best patient care by fulfilling staff`s requests for the medical supplies and filling the supply carts in various departments on a daily basis. This can be achieved by measuring the number of items replenished in the carts divided by the total number of items requested. The goal is to strive to be near the ratio 1:1, which would mean that all the items requested were fulfilled. More than one would mean, more items were provided than requested which implies inefficiencies (misused).
The Term Paper on Improving Patient Care
There is growing enthusiasm in the United States about the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) in outpatient settings. More than $20 billion of the federal economic stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) is slated to assist physicians, hospitals, and other health care settings in adopting health information technology (Gill, 2009). The government wants to shift into the ...
Less than one (1) would mean not all the items that were requested were provided. Innovation and learning perspective: The first goal here is to provide up-to-date trainings to keep up with the best practices in the supply chain industry. This can simply be achieved by taking the ratio of number of people trained in a certain period by the total staff in the department. The goal here is to get all the employees to receive appropriate training.
Our second goal is to retain qualified personnel. By measuring the number of people leaving voluntarily divided by the total number staff in the department. Financial Perspective: One of the major goals of supply chain in any business is to lower operating costs. Operating costs can include personnel salaries and other managerial costs e.g. travel expenses to begin with. So, the costs can be calculated by measuring the ratio of all operating/ managerial expenses to the value of all the goods and services procured by Supply chain. Such a ratio will justify higher operating costs as the burden of supply chain goes up which is basically measured through total value of goods it procures. Internal Business perspective: Availability of certain hospital supplies is time sensitive. It is imperative to fulfil product requisitions as fast as it arrives. Therefore, our next measure is to check how fast these requisitions are turning into purchase orders. This can be measured, by keeping a tab on the time gap between when a requisition arrives and when a purchase order is issued. The smaller the gap, the better is the management of the supply chain system.
All said and done, designing a scorecard for the goals in the supply chain management will give a roadmap for the entire department of what is expected and/or the anticipated goals. Additionally, it provides measures of how to achieve those goals through various perspectives.
The Term Paper on Supply Chain Management 12
... the supply chain. Time and cost are key measures, but others are used as appropriate to the specific supply chain. All measures relate to the ultimate supply chain goals. 3. ... Supply chain management Supply chain management (SCM) is the process of organizing, operating, and controlling supply chains. The concept of supply chain management began in the early sixties; however, it ...
