How are you managing your inventory? Do you even know where your inventory is? Do you know when inventory is going to expire, and do you have a plan for how to handle it when it does?
It’s pretty common for us to hear that medical device companies, particularly new and small businesses, are managing their inventory in an Excel spreadsheet with multiple people editing; a hotbed for error and a nightmare for inventory visibility and tracking. Even companies using software to manage their inventory are often frustrated and discouraged when trying to track their items once it’s outside of their warehouse. The point is, you need tools that are designed to specifically deliver visibility across your entire inventory ecosystem–where it is and who has it–otherwise, how can you optimize your inventory utilization to support sales?
Perhaps even more important is being able to find and pull inventory back in from the field whenever necessary. Having visibility into your inventory, both current and previously used in surgical cases, is critical in managing device recalls and to handle batches of expiring inventory. In the case of expiring inventory, imagine if, instead of letting waves of inventory expire annually, you could identify where that product was 90 days out from expiration and incentivize your sales team to move through that inventory first! And after that, be able to locate the inventory and pull it back from the field in a timely manner to ensure you don’t have expired inventory floating around, creating added risk for your business.
When choosing your tools for inventory and case management in the medical device industry, you need to consider all of the scenarios unique to this business and ask if the tools you’re considering can deliver true inventory visibility, inventory data management (like UDI and Expiration dates), and chain of custody traceability. ConnectSx delivers on all fronts (and then some). Reach out to learn how we can help.
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