Healthcare Supply Chain Technology and Strategy

Big data is having an impact on organizations’ reaction time to supply chain issues.   (36%), increased supply chain efficiency of 10% or greater   (46%), Improved customer service operations. big da·ta noun COMPUTING extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. "much IT investment is going towards managing and maintaining big data"  The  Big Data Analytics in Supply Chain: Hype or Here to Stay? Accenture Global Operations Megatrends Study  found that companies are achieving significant results using big data analytics to improve supply chain performance and gain greater contextual intelligence. For more information on TSH or MDS call The Systems House, Inc. at 1-800- MDS-5556. Or send a message to  sales@tshinc.com Click here  and tell us how we can help you with your business solutions.

For those who have run sales organizations and are familiar with trying to tackle the sales  commission model, there are no easy answers. It typically starts with something simple like paying off sales dollars and then typically as you grow, it balloons into a mess with multiple calculations, special deals and constant exceptions to the rule.  I have always been a big proponent of paying commissions based upon profit , but that has it's pitfalls as well. So today we look at another way...  Commissions and  Activity Based Costing (ABC)   The value a good Activity Based Costing (ABC) model can bring to a distributor cannot be underrated. A well-designed model can provide powerful insight on profitability drivers and provide useful inputs when making strategic decisions on sales resource allocations and pricing. However, tying sales incentives to the “profit” these models derive can be troublesome. In fact, tying sales incentives to net profit based on an ABC model...

There is a expression that relates walking with elephants. Do you lead the elephant? or does the elephant lead you?  The interesting truth is that while we would all like to think we are leading the elephant around , it's not really true. And we all know that if the elephant wants to go somewhere it's going to to go there, we really don't have the tools to change it.  So today's lesson is about understanding the forces of change and how elephants can be lead around and applying that lesson to an elephant in your business, namely...  Dead Inventory Quite often, even among well-run businesses, the actual costs of inventory are inaccurate, underestimated and incomplete. While most distributors know they have dead inventory, many are unaware of just how much. Even in well-run companies, anywhere from 20-30 percent of inventory is dead or obsolete. While that is huge and alone could have devastating ramifications for a business, how do you calculate the real costs to...

Today’s technologies allow digital businesses (as well as a growing roster of traditional companies) to change prices frequently, even minute-by-minute in real time if they want to. It is not unusual for prices to change on sites like Amazon, Expedia, and Priceline several times a day. But managers are struggling to understand these tactics. How often should companies really change their prices?  For any enterprise, the biggest constraint in changing prices is the “menu cost.” Historically, price changes were expensive and time-consuming. Price lists had to be recalculated, typed up, and mailed to customers; new catalogs, labels, and signs had to be printed. This forced companies to maintain prices. Throughout the 2000s, even as the Internet continued to grow, prices remained the same for  months at a time . Over the past few years, however, technology has drastically shifted the economics of price changes.  Pricing optimization software  helps companies link co...