Restructuring hospitals, offshoring drug production, e-health boom, growth in eco-responsible practices… In a rapidly changing market that is opening up and diversifying, health networks are reorganizing to cope with changes and keep costs under control.
Aware that logistics has become a key element in the performance race, healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to optimize their Supply Chain in a spirit of pooling as soon as possible. The challenge is to minimize expenses without compromising the quality of patient care.
Why do health professionals have to rely on pooling their flows?
1. Health: a changing market, conducive to pooling
With 135 Groupements Hospitaliers de Territoire (GHT), 4000 sampling sites, 271 pharmaceutical sites, and nearly 1500 companies from Med Tech, the health sector in France is a dynamic market that represents 21% of national GDP.
And this market is constantly evolving! With the aging of the population, the development of chronic diseases, the reinforcement of telemedicine and the consumption of care, the health branch is challenged on all sides. In an ultra-competitive environment, operational experience becomes imperative.
Pharmaceutical laboratories, depositories, distributive wholesalers, public and private health establishments, medical biology laboratories, pharmacies, manufacturers of medical devices, etc. All have understood the need for more flexible and cost-effective flow management to improve performance and competitiveness.
Indeed, in professions where the quality of care provided to the patient is central, the challenges are expressed in terms of delivery times, compliance with regulations, guarantee of the cold chain, but also in terms of productivity and competitiveness. To meet all these challenges, the Supply Chain plays a decisive role, because only those players who will rely on agile and efficient supply chains will be able to cope with changes in practices and remain a leader in their market.
2. What optimization solutions ?
The pooling of stocks and flows rhymes with economy. However, the health sector is lagging behind: Several surveys* show that the logistical costs of the sector are comparatively higher than in other industries, which took the optimization trick earlier. A shortfall when we know that most of the flows of drugs, vaccines, serums, consumables, reagents or samples are mutualisable and transportable at a lower cost, in compliance with customer specifications and public health standards.
■ In public and private health facilities: the possibilities of optimization are numerous. The major players (Groupements Hospitaliers de Territoires, groups of clinics, health centres, EHPAD, etc.) bring together multiple establishments within them, which must be supplied daily with various products. To limit logistics-related costs, these players often choose to centralize their stocks on a single platform and to feed all their structures from that platform. To operate optimally, this organization must rely on a fast, shared and traced 27/7 delivery service.
■ Big phama companies seek more and more to mass and pool their flows by relying on logistics providers capable of meeting all their requirements (traceability, geolocation, international freight, etc.). Like the major industrialists, many of them have opted for a simple and economic organization, based on 1 or 2 central stocks, national or European, and have adopted at the same time a logistics of the Just-In-Time that allows to meet the supply requests of their customers, while avoiding excess or break of stock.
■ For MEDTECH professionals, logistics is just as crucial, whether it is during the transport and installation stages of medical equipment and automatons, which require care and precaution, or during maintenance or repair operations, which require spare parts to be made available as soon as possible, as close as possible and at a lower cost. Using a logistician who has a powerful and shared distribution network therefore reduces response times and limits the time it takes for devices to come to a standstill.
■ Laboratories of analysis in anatomocytopathology that send samples every day to their technical trays or sample kits to the nurses can also consider pooling of their flows, benefiting from mutualised tours: the passage times remain predefined and are strictly respected; simply, they have more competitive rates. In terms of supplies, working with an operator with a picking/kitting platform and a pooled distribution network enables products to be collected at the end of the day and delivered overnight. Thus, the sampling kits will be available to nurses early in the morning before their rounds. And the samples can be analyzed in the night or the first hour the next morning with faster results of analyses.
3. What concrete benefits?
By focusing on pooling their stocks and flows, healthcare professionals seek to optimize their organization and logistics costs, with a substantial savings of up to 20%.
As we said, many manufacturers have chosen to centralize their stock and have opted for a “on demand” replenishment system. This model frees up additional land and saves on working capital requirements. Hospitals and manufacturers are only invoiced when the goods leave the warehouse. Clinics, for example, often located in areas where the square meter is expensive, therefore have every interest in storing their products in areas where land is less expensive.
In the pharmaceutical industry, concrete examples of pooling have been established. Pooling (pooled supply management) has been extended to pharmaceutical companies with successful experiences in the delivery of medicines. Several advantages: better truck filling rates, reduced CO2 emissions, reduced risk of stock shortages for the customer, economies of scale. Only constraint: the products transported must be compatible and intended for the same distribution networks.
Finally, pooling helps to decarbonize the activities related to the transport of products: the more a distribution network is powerful and mutualised, the lower the carbon balance per product transported. The density of your service provider’s network in terms of the number of stops made per day (collection or delivery) is therefore an indicator to be observed.
4. To pool, you better be accompanied!
Pooling stocks and flows is not improvised. To rethink its logistics organization, it is imperative to be well supported and to choose the right logistics provider. In particular, it is essential to be able to rely on a dense and shared distribution network and to have a complete and modular offer of urgent services, adapted to the criticality of each situation. This corollary is the ultimate condition to guarantee your facilities and/or patients a fast and reliable distribution and replenishment, including from a central platform.
Whether they are clinical trials, biological samples, grafts, pharmaceutical products or medicines, healthcare professionals must be able to benefit from an efficient supply chain, traced and adapted to the typology of their products. The choice of the logistics operator is crucial: From the dedicated race to the shared tour, including storage, packaging, picking/kitting and reverse logistics services, it must be able to deliver an “all-in-one” logistics service, in compliance with public health regulations and standards, as a guarantee of economic and energy efficiency.
SOURCES
[1] Survey Beaulieu et Roy in 2019
