1 Big Inventory Control Risk: Medical Device Shipments to the Field

Inventory control can’t account for shipping mishaps, what visibility do you have?

When you ship your medical device inventory to the field, how certain are you that it’s secure? Certainly, we can trust our shipping partners to handle precious cargo with care, to a point, but what about once it has arrived? 

Inventory control procedures are critical when the inventory is in-house, but once it reaches the field uncertainty is the rule (without the right tools and procedures).

It’s an all too common occurrence that shipments of medical devices don’t get where they are going and with mail fraud on the rise, it begs the question: Do you know where your shipments are? 

The reality of this industry is that shipments are constantly in motion, as are medical device distributors, and so are our healthcare providers. Wheels are always turning and so many critical handoffs have to happen in less than ideal ways, which introduce risk to the value chain. 

What do I mean by this?

• Shipments get left outside of a surgery center or doctor’s office until a member of staff arrives to claim them, but its critical that they arrive for a case that day.
• Or a shipment is sitting on a rep’s front porch, because delivering to their house was the only way they could meet the shipment in time for the case.
• The shipment is delivered to a residence by mistake, who knows how long it may take to track the shipment back and find out where it is currently.

Consider especially sterile-packed devices, which must be transported under certain temperatures, conditions, and treated with care. When shipments contain sensitive, high-quality surgical instruments and implants, sometimes totaling tens of thousands of dollars in value, it starts to seem unfathomable that shipments would be treated this way. But sometimes it’s what you have to do to get the job done. 

The safety of your shipments and ultimately the health of your medical device inventory can rely on your inventory control procedures. As James Clear puts it, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” So what systems have you put in place; what standards, processes, and safeguards have you trained your field team in to ensure that your inventory controls are effective?

So what can you do to protect your shipments? 

• Tracking information: Get it, communicate it to the recipient, and use it to track your shipments to their destinations to ensure arrival in time for sterilization and surgery. The sooner you notice an issue with a shipment, the sooner your team can get on the phone to resolve it. 
• Engagement: Engage the recipients of your shipment. Communicate with your team, and/or the healthcare provider’s staff. Let a distributor know when a shipment is going to arrive, coordinate pickup, and do whatever you can to ensure safe keeping of the products so they are ready for surgery. 
• Manage In-Context: Provide your operations team and your shipment recipients with full context of the shipment – what’s in it, when it will arrive, what surgical case it is for, etc. If your software tools allow, link your shipment to your other operational information, so that when there is an issue with an order you may track it to the inventory involved and the case that will be affected. Enhance inventory control by leveraging your sales and inventory data in context with your shipping and receiving procedures. That way recipient stakeholders and temporary carriers can ensure that there is a shared understanding of the impacts of an issue and increases the visibility of adjacent teams to any shipping delays. 

Shipping can be an unpredictable and troublesome component of any supply chain, because we don’t always know what to expect. Without field inventory control you may be faced with delays, lost shipments, damaged items, etc, which can jeopardize the success of the surgery and the potential sale.

In the interest of making sure every surgery has what it needs to proceed, we have to do everything we can to mitigate these unexpected roadblocks. This involves proactive management, streamlined communication, and leveraging the operational context to devise solutions.

Building a robust tracking and management mechanism in your organization is the only way to ensure shipments are getting where they need to go on time. If you’re interested in improving your operation, but you’re not sure try out our free readiness assessment.

If you are ready to bring more visibility and connectedness to your field ops, let’s talk about how Beacon can bring value to your inventory control procedures.