Founded in Texas in 2006, HealthCARE Express began as an urgent care organization with a vision of delivering unparalleled customer service, achieving financial success and providing a fantastic work environment.
Today HealthCARE Express owns and operates urgent care facilities in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, and has expanded the care model to include occupational medicine clinics, physical therapy, imaging centers, dermatology and more.
THE HEALTHCARE EXPRESS STORY
To deliver exceptional and consistent service throughout the organization, the materials management team set goals to create and build an enterprise-wide solution that would deliver on their vision of customer service and financial success, while also creating an outstanding and efficient environment for the staff.”
Creating an Enterprise Approach
“With 14 locations, we needed an enterprise solution to manage all facilities through a single system – and importantly – we wanted to create an enterprise item master as the foundation for system-wide procurement and inventory management,” said Ashlee Stafford, Director of Laboratory Operations/ Materials Management, HealthCARE Express.”
“We selected the Envi® procure to pay solution. We set goals at the corporate level to target what we specifically wanted to achieve, and then set our sights on building alignment with every location. For an enterprise approach to succeed, we knew we would have to seamlessly incorporate every facility into our new, evolving processes. But we also knew the visibility we would gain would be worth the effort.”
Recipe for Success
The team created a communication path to bring team members together and support the design and implementation of new processes. They established steps
to facilitate the roll-out of the Envi solution:
- Clear communication of benefits came from the highest level of HealthCARE Express to every facility, helping align team members around the implementation of the new inventory system and processes
- Key team members were identified as leads at each facility; they were trained to use and manage the Envi system
- A new process workflow was defined that incorporated the needs of each facility and set the expectation for system-wide compliance
- Visibility and accountability were created through reporting; each site understood that leadership would use facility-specific reports to create greater visibility and enterprise-wide management
- Continual communication built an appreciation of how valuable the system and processes are to every member of the team – and the patients – at HealthCARE Express.
Building Enterprise Visibility
“Today we know what products should be at each location and what is actually on the shelf,” said Stafford. “This helps us manage our costs. We’ve built visibility to actual usage by site and can easily manage cash flow by transferring products between locations when needed. With an accurate and up-to-date inventory, we’re also able to reap the benefits of AutoPO (system generated orders). This saves an immense amount of time, which was previously spent managing the creation of purchase orders for our many vendors. With Envi, we can now be sure we’re paying the same price for the same product across our network.”
“One of the biggest efficiencies we gained was in the invoice processing area. Envi helped us advance from
receiving paper invoices every day to being able to manage invoices electronically within the system. Now we can sort and review invoices by date, facility or even vendor. That’s been hugely helpful – we no longer risk losing paper invoices and we don’t have to scan everything in. With Envi we can quickly review and approve invoices, then transfer to QuickBooks for payment. Everything is coded to match the QuickBooks chart of accounts on the backend, so we don’t have to manually add that information anymore, and we know what products are being purchased throughout the organization.”
Automation Best Practices: Usage Tracking
By providing scanners and training the staff to use them in every location, HealthCARE Express is able to:
- Instantly understand consumption in each facility;
scanning immediately decrements on-hand quantities - Help make every facility’s physical counts faster and
more efficient - Track and understand consumption across multiple
users in every location - Created a report that showcased scanner usage was at
100% compliance, which in turn helps enable easy and
accurate reporting and inventory tracking from every
facility
