The Wentworth-Douglass Hospital is part of the $18 billion Mass General Brigham (MGB) health care system. Their IT department is responsible for issuing computers and peripherals to support hospitals—but they were doing this without any purpose-built inventory software.
Research projects required extra tracking because the IT spend on each project had to be accurately allocated and reported. The IT department also has to track the serial numbers of computers and other high-value pieces of equipment.
To manage all of this inventory, the IT department relied on an Excel spreadsheet and Claris Filemaker, a database and custom app platform. But those systems were so difficult to use that only 10 per cent of the IT equipment—including the highest-value items—could be fully tracked.
Juggling multiple systems wasn’t working
One particular challenge was tracking items that were supposed to be returned to the stockroom after use. Juggling two systems made it tough to see which items were due back, and on which dates. There was no support for ordering new items by sending a purchase order to a vendor; that process had to be done outside of the inventory systems.
“Before we were doing everything manually [using spreadsheets],” said Karen Fortier, a Financial Analyst at MGB’s Wentworth-Douglass Hospital. They maintained a stockroom of commonly-requested IT equipment and processed special orders for other equipment that was required from time to time.
Similarly, shipping items from the stockroom to other sites required a different set of tools the IT department was using.
inFlow streamlined inventory management
After comparing offers from multiple vendors, the IT department tested and adopted inFlow Inventory, to handle purchasing, tracking, transferring, selling, and shipping inventory in one system. inFlow’s web, Windows, and mobile apps made it easy to see up-to-date information from anywhere.
The IT department at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital uses inFlow to send purchase orders to vendors whenever they need to restock. inFlow tracks the serial numbers of high-value items to ensure that the right pieces of equipment are sent (and returned from) MGB sites and research labs. And inFlow Inventory provides an easy way to flag overdue items and get them back to stockroom shelves. To report on IT spend for research projects, the IT department organizes items into sublocations based on each research project to track costs accordingly.
Shipping is now simpler for the IT department, since inFlow’s integrated shipping and label printing features make it possible to create a shipment and print shipping labels from one system. Even labelling boxes on the shelves is easier thanks to inFlow’s built-in Label Designer, which the IT department used to make labels that clearly show the contents of each box.
inFlow has also helped them to simplify reporting to quickly call up inventory counts and valuations by location and by product type; it’s become much easier to see the IT equipment that each site or research project had been issued.
Last but not least, overall inventory levels can now be properly tracked thanks to inFlow’s built-in reports. With a few clicks the IT department can see which site or research project has equipment on loan.
inFlow increased inventory tracking by ten fold
“I would not be able to do what I am doing” without an inventory system, said Fortier. “It was a huge benefit.”
With the new system, the IT department could track 100% of the items they stocked—up from just 10% when using their previous system.
They were also able to cut down the number of required steps for inventory tracking by roughly 50%, shaving significant time off of their everyday work.
In fact, processes that took 15–20 minutes using the old systems were completed in just three minutes using inFlow. “It’s been an invaluable tool,” Fortier said.
“I had checked out other applications,” Fortier continued. For inFlow’s price point, with serial numbers and sublocations, “It’s worked well for us.”
0 Comments