What is the Role of Supply Chain Management in the Healthcare Industry?

In a global scenario, supply chain management has become a vital element in the healthcare industry that carries the burden of millions of lives around the world. Recently, we have gone through the COVID-19 pandemic, where the failure of the supply chain is one of the crucial factors behind the loss of lives. If we had a sustainable supply chain to deliver medicines, healthcare professions, patients, and medical equipment, we would have saved so many lives. But life is always full of experiences, and humans tend to learn from their mistakes.

Since then, the healthcare industry has been working hard to build a supply chain that can support people in similar scenarios. And businesses have achieved so much that we have established communications between the healthcare profession and patients, connected manufacturers with distributors, streamlined good flow, and offered a great patient experience.

Before moving forward to understand how supply chain management is revolutionising the healthcare industry, let us understand the major challenges that are hindering a smooth flow of goods from one place to another.

Common Supply Chain Challenges in Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is getting more complex day-by-day. With the evolving market and customer needs, we are witnessing disruptions in the supply chain that are having a huge impact on global hospitals and healthcare facilities. Some of such challenges are:

Evolving Technology and Innovations

Adopting the latest technologies and innovations into the existing supply chain is a complex task that needs to be performed. Because adopting technologies can simplify the supply chain and eliminate disruptions to maintain the highest accuracy and business efficiency.

Compliance Acceptance

Global compliances and norms are subject to change as per the government of a particular country. Among different industries, healthcare is the most regulated as it is directly linked to saving lives. To establish a consistent supply chain covering different nations, a healthcare organisation has to follow all rules, norms, and compliances for a smooth flow.

Sudden Increase in Cost

Increasing complexity in the supply chain leads to enhanced costs for customers. Whereas customers still want a high-quality product without paying any extra money. The supply chain is making costs higher and leading businesses to be incapable of fulfilling customer needs. This is increasing the cost of medical supplies and equipment necessary for global industry.

Lack of Consistent Demand

You don’t know when the demand for healthcare products will be high or low. It all depends on certain situations. Due to the highly volatile demand in the healthcare industry, stocking products to meet unexpected demand has become a challenging task. This is one of the major reasons for an inconsistent supply chain, leading to healthcare risks.

Complicated Supply Chain

A healthcare supply chain consists of different milestones that include manufacturer, quality check, standard equipment acceptance, involving stakeholders, relying on distributors, and a streamlined delivery system. For a consistent supply chain, we need to build a relationship between all milestones to ensure efficient coordination and continuous delivery.

Eliminating such challenges isn’t easy at all unless you have a powerful ERP solution specifically built to cater to healthcare organisations.

Benefits of Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry

Supply Chain Management brings high-quality patient care and timely delivery of medical supplies and equipment. It eliminates the chance of healthcare shortages and improves overall efficiency. It comes with various benefits, among which some are:

Supports Demand Forecasting

Forecasting demands is as important as building a sustainable supply chain without any disruptions. When you have a consistent supply chain, you can easily make estimates of deliveries, perform stock planning, and forecast demands with higher accuracy.

Also, it enables a business to enhance productivity and establish communication across stakeholders, distributors, and customers.

Less Operational Costs

When the healthcare industry has a working supply chain, they will be able to get the supplies they want whenever required, leading to lower operating costs while registering special logistics. It pushes the healthcare industry to be more effective and control the higher product prices with streamlined inventory control.

Streamlined Delivery

With a smoother supply chain, healthcare supplies can be delivered on time, empowering organisations to provide the provide the optimum level of client care. It keeps the logistics running regardless of disruptions and impacts on the supply chain due to changing global scenarios.

Offers Automation

The supply chain consists of different complicated processes that can be eliminated with automation, ensuring maximum efficiency with minimal error. However, you will need to implement a modern ERP supply chain management system, like Dynamics 365 SCM, to automate and supercharge your business with innovations and technologies.

Supports Digitalisation

Digitalisation is simplifying our lives as well as the way we do business. A successful supply chain enables the business and the customer to get real-time data insights about the status of the product. Digitalisation enables businesses to supply the exact product to the customer in the shortest amount of time possible. It enables you to streamline data flow, avail data insights, record patient interaction, monitor essential assets, and follow regulatory compliance.

Introducing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in Healthcare

D365 SCM is a part of Microsoft Cloud in the healthcare industry that is eliminating existing challenges in the supply chain with modern and cutting-edge technologies. It can push complex business processes towards a simplified and revenue generating path of growth by leveraging the power of the cloud and automation.

It is a flexible and innovative platform to simplify supply chain processes in the healthcare industry, along with offering full visibility and optimising demand planning. With proper implementation, it allows businesses to perform faster replenishment and reduce delivery lead times.

Dynamics 365 for healthcare eliminates the chances of stockouts and overstocking, ensuring the right number of stocks at the right time with real-time inventory data. With advanced tools and SCM capabilities, you can monitor supplier performance, track delivery of medical supplies, and simplify the order fulfilment process.

When it comes to Dynamics 365 SCM implementation, you need to look for reliable and trustworthy Microsoft solutions partners with a proven track record of working in the healthcare industry, like Dynamics Square.

Being a top-notch choice for growing businesses around the globe, our team of healthcare solutions experts is available to help you track your supply chain, analyse all milestones, find disruptions, and eliminate them with the sustainable Dynamics 365 solution.

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