How a healthcare provider automated 100% of their PPE inventory management during the pandemic

Location: Philadelphia

The Client

healthcare service provider that needed a quick solution for managing their PPE inventory

Overview

A healthcare service provider that needed to continuously operate during the pandemic while ensuring safety of their employees, was in the need of an easy and intuitive system for managing their PPE inventory. Considering the situation, the client decided to buy the protective gear from all the available vendors. This caused in disruption of traditional inventory management practice that uses QR codes, and they needed an easy way to let the users do inventory related transactions.

How did it help the client?

Out of Stock Incidence

Transactions Per Week

Automated Order Replenishment

0 %

The Challenge

With the rise of pandemic, all the businesses around the world, specifically the ones that had to continue their operations onsite, wanted to ensure the safety of their employees. For this, they had to procure personal protective equipment like PPE kits, gowns, gloves, safety glasses etc. in larger quantities. With limited supply from the preferred brands/vendors, business started procuring goods from all the available sources. This resulted in disruption of traditional bar code-based inventory management that had fixed number of products. The client needed a very robust solution that can quickly and easily let the users execute inventory transactions, while offering all the necessary features of a traditional inventory management system.

The Approach

The client wanted the system to be 100% mobile and easy to use. We developed a mobile app within the client’s technology stack to avoid any additional subscription costs. As the inventory was being procured from several new vendors, the traditional bar code-based solution was replaced with a product category-based approach.

The initial goal when we started working on the app was to keep it minimal for the users so that the transactions can be completed in lesser steps, while giving robust data and reporting to the procurement for timely decisions.

Ashish Solanki

Solution Expert

The Solution

The PPE inventory mobile app allowed the users to find the products by navigating through categories and sub-categories. This helped in consolidating products from all vendors into similar buckets, eliminating the dependency of storing bar codes. The users can navigate through categories like shoe covers, lab coats, eye safety etc. and find a right product that they want to record the transaction form. Inventory locations like warehouses, storage areas and labs were pre-created to execute issue and receiving transaction of the goods. Each product was marked with a safety stock at each location, sending instant alerts to the supervisors for low inventory items.

The Result

The solution was adopted quickly, and the team started using it fully within a week from deployment. More than 200 inventory transactions were recorded each week initially with real-time alerts to the procurement team for the goods that are nearing the safety stock. This resulted in zero outage of PPE goods throughout the pandemic period.