Community Blood Center of the Carolinas Wins Q2 2018 Best Practice Award!

by | Jul 31, 2018 | Quarterly Best Practice Awards

Every quarter, Inventory Optimization Solutions (IOS) identifies and shares best practices from among our current users to help educate the healthcare community on supply chain automation, especially in the non-acute healthcare market.

Congratulations to Community Blood Center of the Carolinas (CBCC), the winner of the IOS Q2 2018 Best Practice Award. CBCC has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in the implementation of Envi® supply chain solutions, aligning people, process and technology to deliver greater automation, centralization, visibility and control to the organization.

The Community Blood Center of the Carolinas (CBCC) Story

Katie Risvold
Project Manager
CBCC is a local blood bank serving hospitals and patients in the Carolinas. A team of over 150 employees support five collection centers and mobile blood facilities. CBCC is a member of Blood Centers of America which is a cooperative of 51 not for profit independent community blood centers representing nearly 40% of the American blood supply. CBCC believes in a community-based philosophy: blood provided by donors stays in our community first to help family members, friends and neighbors, then excess supply is shared with other communities when it’s needed most.
The corporate headquarters of CBCC is using the Envi solution from IOS to support a central warehouse in Charlotte, which leverages a spoke and wheel model to manage product procurement and supply distribution for all of CBCC’s facilities. An additional warehouse in Greensboro supports supplies needed for mobile blood drives.

  

Leadership Vision with Team Commitment

Our leadership team continually looks to drive innovation and pioneer best practices. As NBC made a decision to implement the Envi solution across member blood centers, we were excited to be among the first to go-live. Because we’re so committed to delivering the highest quality services on behalf of our organization, community and donors, we were excited about this project, knowing we could build new best practices that would help other blood centers as they got ready to go live.
We formed an internal team: Don Wall, CFO, and Julio Amador, purchasing and inventory supervisor and myself. Our goals centered on making implementation easy for our users, end-to-end process enhancements, and strategic alignment, enabling a new model of centralization, standardization, price consolidation and efficiency.
We organized the implementation project based on tasks, process workflows and user roles. Julio did an exceptional job with data preparation and Provista provided us with data cleansing services. We did process mapping to compare previous to future state, and prepare users for change. When we went live, adoption was immediate. We spent time on training (both onsite and web-based) to make sure users were ready; everyone was required to participate in a training session.
 

Results

We’re now funneling all purchasing through the central warehouse function. Team members in the blood centers have visibility to standard products and can create requisitions to replenish supplies. Julio manages
supplies overall for the organization, and is able to ensure we’ve got the best prices on items we use. With our standardized formulary, we can now aggregate our purchasing and negotiate for better pricing.

Envi is creating visibility into the overall inventory lifecycle – from ordering through item consumption. One of the previous challenges was not being able to track inventory stored in remote locations; we felt like we had waste due to product expirations. Now we can “see” our inventory and track by lot numbers and expiration dates. We have better oversight throughout the organization.

We’re excited about the new reporting tools available in Envi. We envision a future where staff members in remote facilities won’t even have to create requisitions – we’ll be able to anticipate what they need.

Summary of Best Practices

 

Control

  • Implemented a standard formulary with Envi Requisitioning
  • Streamlined and simplified the user experience
  • Built confidence we’re buying
    supplies at the best possible price
  • Improved management of
    inventory; can see when supplies are low or overstocked

 

Process Consolidation

  • Consolidated several separate
    requisitioning processes into our main workflow
  • Streamlined marketing and
    recruiting team’s process for
    ordering and managing supplies
    needed for donors
  • Created overall inventory and
    ordering processes

 

Team Approach

  • Developed internal communications for team preparation
  • Partnered with the IOS team to
    facilitate process mapping, user
    training and user templates
  • Achieved organizational adoption of Envi; seeing benefits across procurement processes