ONE NETWORK’S RESILIENCE PROGRAM TO TRANSFORM THE HEALTHCARE SUPPLY CHAIN
The ONE Global Health Network: A new platform for hospitals and their suppliers that boosts resiliency, efficiency and collaboration across the supply chain
The global pandemic of COVID-19 put massive strains on healthcare supply chains. While the pandemic is unprecedented, we know that any disruptive event from an earthquake to a product recall to an airline strike can impact the supply chain. We have seen severe shortages of products that were in high demand, like masks and testing kits, while a freeze on elective surgeries caused a buildup of non-essential products in the supply chain. In many cases, products that were in demand in one area were available in another, but were not accessible to those in need.
One Network Enterprises recently announced its new healthcare solution to address these problems and more. The ONE Global Health Network, running on One Network’s NEO Platform, is uniquely designed to increase resilience, transparency and collaboration in the healthcare supply chain with a demand-driven approach – and the partnership’s Resilience Healthcare Supply Chain Transformation Program is designed to get you started quickly. The ONE Global Health Network solution improves performance across the entire supply chain, raises service levels, increases efficiency, and strengthens customer relationships.
The solution is designed to help suppliers answer critical questions like:
- How much inventory do my customers have and where is it located?
- When do they plan to re-order?
- What will they order and how much?
- How can I increase resilience in my own supply chain?
- How can I lock-in my customers, gain market share, and grow my business profitably?
The system uses data-driven forecasting and provides process automation, so suppliers can accelerate the replenishment process, and operate more efficiently at lower costs.
Suppliers to Hospitals Gain Visibility and Operational Efficiency
Hospitals and health systems connected to the ONE Global Health Network provide transparent information on inventory locations, quantities, and order forecasts to their partners. This near real-time information enables suppliers and distributors to:
- Better optimize inventories and replenishment
- Gain efficiencies and cost reduction in manufacturing and logistics, including reducing their reliance on premium freight
- Identify potential issues early – before they become critical problems
- Improve delivery performance and service levels
- Capture every revenue opportunity and gain market share as a preferred supplier
Transacting over a real-time network enables health systems and suppliers to improve processes and collaborate more closely with each other to execute and resolve issues. It streamlines supply chains across the entire network where multiple parties plan and execute on a single version of truth for each transaction.
Hospitals Achieve Lower Risk of Stockouts, Improved Patient-Care, and Enhanced Supply Resiliency
By providing suppliers with visibility to inventory and order forecasts, hospital networks are less vulnerable to demand surges and less likely to encounter supply shortages. The hospital can plan more efficiently with better information. They can answer critical questions like:
- How much inventory do I have and where is it located?
- Exactly when will my orders arrive and will they be complete?
- Do others in my network have availability where I have increased demand?
- How can I find alternatives and onboard new partners quickly?
- How can I further ensure patient care and provide safety for all?
Supply chain resilience benefits not only patients but also enhances the safety of nurses, doctors, and staff by ensuring the supply of critical items like personal protective equipment (PPE).
Benefits for Healthcare Suppliers and Distributors
- Provide accurate real-time, patient-driven demand signals for each supply tier and supplier site in the network, which aligns production schedules to demand, enables supply optimization and improves supplier on-time and in-full (OTIF) performance.
- Automate supplier planning and order execution with the healthcare network and GPOs reducing the cost to serve and improve service levels and responsiveness to the hospitals.
- Automate and optimize reliable direct supplier-to hospital delivery with third-party carrier networks.
- Enable high speed same-day and next-day delivery on dynamic logistics networks to serve emergency or unexpected hospital situations.
- Decrease the frequency and cost of expediting.
- Reduce global and domestic transportation costs and improve pickup and delivery reliability.
- Block security risk components from entering the supply chain – eliminate counterfeit leakage.
Secure and Controlled Data Sharing for All
All healthcare network participants – suppliers, distributors, hospitals and their teams – are in control of the data elements they choose to share and who they choose to share them with. As an example, participants may choose to share:
- Item purchase information and history with their supply aggregation group
- Inventory location information and quantities at facilities across a health system
- Order forecast data with key strategic suppliers to help ensure supply and rapid replenishment
New Resilience in Global Healthcare
Recent events are driving a fundamental change in the relationship between hospitals and their suppliers. A new collaborative “give-get” relationship is emerging.
In exchange for greater supply chain resilience, hospitals are willing to provide better inventory visibility, better demand forecasts, faster order placement, and greater collaboration with their suppliers. For suppliers and distributors, the benefits are substantial. Just as suppliers are held accountable on service levels and rapid replenishment, providers will be held accountable on order forecast accuracy.
This new “give-get” relationship has many dimensions. Fact is, in almost every industry, time lags, inventory buffers and costs have been driven out (and responsiveness dramatically increased) with collaborative supply-demand matching in a real time network. It’s not a new concept. Except in Healthcare.
Start Fast and Scale with Powerful Network Capabilities
This Healthcare Resilience Program is being deployed now by One Network Enterprises to provide access to the new solution. It’s designed to get suppliers and hospitals up and running fast, with minimal involvement of IT resources. The aim is to help manufacturers and distributors with new demand-driven processes to optimize internal supply chains, improve hospital service levels, optimize inbound systems, and lower costs – as it boosts supply chain resilience for hospitals.
ONE Global Health Network Benefits for Hospitals
- Improve hospital supply in-stock performance and eliminate or minimize supply shortage impacts on patients.
- Reduce labor costs in managing the inbound supply chain – automate and optimize supply ordering, forecasting, replenishment, inventory management and transportation.
- Improve cash flow and supply performance – optimize inventory at all tiers in the supply chain, including at hospitals, warehouses, distribution centers (DC) and Supplier DCs.
- Streamline hospital logistics deliveries, reduce expedites and reduce transportation costs to support lower inventory buffer levels, reduce supply delivery variance which improves safety stock level optimization.
- Streamline the reverse flow of medical supplies for refurbishment and recycling.
ONE Global Health Network Benefits for Doctors and Patients
- Improve patient outcomes with adaptive hospital department and doctor specific supply polices.
- Enhance visibility to manage product recalls.
- Streamline, automate and decrease the amount of time required to prepare for patient visits.
- Eliminate stock-outs and provide doctor and patient tailored supply options at the best price.
- Allow doctors more flexibility to change operation supply menus with confidence that the desired medical suppliers will be available when needed.
- Gain supply resiliency with proactive mitigation of critical Tier 1 and Tier 2 supply issues, regulatory and environmental events.
The ONE Global Health Network
The Resilience Healthcare Transformation program is also part of One Network’s larger solution – the ONE Global Health Network – that offers greater end-to-end functionality for a demand-driven, patient-focused supply chain strategy in Healthcare. One Network helps global businesses optimize supply chains from inbound supply to manufacturing to outbound order fulfillment and logistics.
One Network’s NEO Platform and control tower solution are recognized as industry-leading by analysts. One Network is a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multi-enterprise Supply Chain Business Networks. ONE is also rated as a Leader by Nucleus Research in the Control Tower Technology Value Matrix for the fourth consecutive year, as well as in their Supply Chain Planning Technology Value Matrix.
Healthcare Network Control Tower
One Network’s Healthcare Network Control Tower provides comprehensive multi-party end-to-end supply chain visibility, AI automated decision-making, plan-to-actual tracking, alerting, automated problem mitigation and KPI visualization. It enables supply responsiveness to doctor-driven product preferences with continuous adaptation to local hospital department polices, needs, and requirements.
The control tower includes automated decision-making and execution across all parties with the appropriate level of visibility, control and alerting across any combination of hospitals, regions, suppliers and even entire healthcare networks. It enables multi-tier tracking of assets, inventory, sensors, serialized items, workflow states, plans and transactions.
Inbound Supply Optimization and Business Continuity
For suppliers and distributors, protecting the integrity of your own supply chain is key to growing market share, satisfying your customers, and ensuring your own business continuity. The ONE Global Health Network helps you optimize manufacturing and co-manufacturing capacities and in-bound raw material requirements around consumer demand.
One Network provides you with a single face to all of your suppliers and logistics providers, enabling multi-tier contract and supplier collaboration, as well as fully integrated logistics management. It also provides industry-leading planning capabilities, including capacity and material constrained planning and optimization, plus integration into ERP systems. With this platform, suppliers and manufacturers can optimize operations, lower costs, and lower inventories, even as they improve services levels to customers.
Complete Traceability and Chain of Custody Solution in Healthcare
A Chain of Custody solution is also available. It is designed to meet GMP, EMA and DSCSA mandates, and tracks the location and linkages between assets, orders, shipments, packages, serialized items, lots and documents.
Detailed serialized lifecycle tracking of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies from manufacturing through to patient care and patient outcome monitoring is becoming more important as many healthcare networks shift to value-based healthcare. Asset tracking includes serialized asset tracking, associated accessories, associated documents, hardware tracking, equipment, device and drug usage, performance and patient outcome history.
As assets flow through the production, transportation and patient care networks, all items and key events are tracked, traceable, and support alerts. This includes: order and shipment transactions and associations, temperature and environmental conditions and violations, lot-level expiration, custody transfers, ownership transfers, proof of delivery, physical locations, and packaging.
Use Artificial Intelligent Agents for Improved Results and Resilience
One Network’s NEO Platform is designed to optimize processes that span hospitals, supply, logistics and warehouse distribution networks. It unlocks tremendous value that is not achievable with single enterprise systems strung together by ad hoc B2B connections and manual B2B or internal Hospital Department-to-Department (D2D) processes.
One Network solutions are focused on bringing continuity, alignment and optimization between traditionally siloed solutions and processes. Planning and AI agents run in parallel directly on transaction streams across corporate boundaries, enabling fast response to unexpected conditions and automating everyday decisions that drive continuous improvements.
One Network’s intelligent agents, called NEO, also identify exceptions, provide options to resolve them (ranked based on economics), recommend decisions or make them autonomously. They can also create or modify transactions and objects in near real-time, across any combination of parties in the healthcare network.
The ONE Global Health Network: Designed for every business that sells to patients, doctors, and hospitals
Pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, implants, lab supplies, medical supplies, PPE, office supplies, furnishings, foods & food service, flooring, lighting, equipment, transportation, couriers, cleaning supplies and more.
Value Now with Ongoing Innovation
The ONE Global Health Network on the NEO Platform is a unique solution now and for the future. It enables rapid onboarding and value now, making your supply chain more efficient, resilient and secure. But the platform also continuously evolves to incorporate new capabilities that keep you at the forefront of innovation in the future. One Network has helped leading organizations around the world and across industries, digitalize their supply chains and transform their operations. Contact us to find out how we can help you do the same.