Why LeeSar's Program Can Pack Heat Virtually Anywhere
Healthcare Purchasing News - March 2007
by Rick Dana Barlow
As a healthcare supply chain manager, it’s easy to look at the LeeSar Regional Service Center’s new custom pack program, be summarily impressed and then dismiss its applicability to your own operation.
The excuses are obvious.
LeeSar is the supply chain management company that provides distribution and custom pack services to Lee Memorial Healthcare System, Fort Myers, FL, and Sarasota (FL) Memorial Health Care System. Essentially, it’s a huge warehouse and process manufacturing plant that services multiple facilities within two integrated deliver networks. You may work in a small hospital in the middle of rural nowhere or toil in a medical fortress shoehorned into a highly populated and traffic-congested metropolitan area where available real estate for a warehouse is slim to none, if not extraordinarily expensive.
LeeSar’s custom pack program has a sizeable dedicated staff, if you consider six full-time equivalents concentrating on one primary – but clinically important – focus “sizeable.” Your boss already told you that you get what you have and no more – whether it’s two persons or 20.
This is a Bob Simpson project and operation. You’re not Bob Simpson.
No matter, according to Gayle Reynolds, CFO, LeeSar and Cooperative Services of Florida (CSF), and Kelly Duncan, LeeSar custom pack operations manager. Even without a warehouse, additional staff or Bob Simpson (who is LeeSar’s and CSF’s president and CEO), it’s possible for just about any sized facility to replicate at least some aspects of LeeSar’s operation. However, they admitted that having a warehouse, more staff and yes, even Bob Simpson, would be a plus.
“If you can develop a strong relationship with a distributor who can deliver the components at a cost effective price and that are picked in the amounts you need for individual pack runs, then I think it is possible for anyone to duplicate this service,” Reynolds told Healthcare Purchasing News. “Additional staff would probably be necessary, depending upon the size of the organization and the amount of packs they need. Although you can produce these packs in relatively little space you would need the ability to store the finished product.”
Duncan concurred. “Not having a warehouse or not being able to hire additional workers can be a challenge because we deal with 600 to 700 line items that must be stored,” she said. So a strong distributor partner is essential.
In fact, LeeSar’s sterilization services partner, American Contract Services (ACS), doesn’t have the capacity to store supplies onsite so it relies on a strong alliance with distributor Owens & Minor Inc. to service the customers for which it assembles and sterilizes custom packs, according to Reynolds.
“With such a strong distribution partner I don’t see a lot of [problems],” she said.
Hiring shouldn’t be an issue either because you’re not recruiting people with high technical skills and compensation demands to match, she added. “You’re hiring for aptitude, attitude and motivation,” she said. “They have to be caring and compassionate about what they do and why they do it.”
Once you have that distribution partner willing to work with you then you can “pick and choose the packs you – wanted to complete,” Reynolds advised. “Some packs deliver more savings than others.”
How much savings will depend on the skills and talents of your contract negotiators, according to Duncan, whether they are internal or part of a group purchasing organization, as well as your relationships with vendors.