Efficient and effective inventory management
Your practice management system can revolutionise your inventory management, and running focused reports can ensure that you are doing so in a cost-effective way. This can help to:
Guarantee optimum stock levels.
Automate ordering and price updates.
Monitor best-selling items.
Avoid money being wasted through discarding out-of-date products.
When transactions are happening quickly throughout the day, it can be hard to keep on top of what is being sold or used, especially within a large team.
Our predecessors had no choice other than to monitor this usage manually; setting aside entire days to tediously count what was in stock and risking running out of essential items in between. Fortunately, it is now easy to run reports on your PMS to simplify this process and to ensure that we are never out of essential stock.
When devising how best to start, it can help to delegate a few members of the team to be in charge of specific areas of inventory management, such as overseeing price changes and dealing with expired products. Of course, there will be some reports that will be the responsibility of the management team, and we shall discuss these here.
Just as you can measure which clinical services are the practice’s best sellers or loss leaders, it is beneficial to repeat this process as part of your inventory management. You can measure transaction history on a clinic level or per employee, as it may be useful to assess if an individual is requiring more of a particular medication or other consumables.
Reports can be run on anything that your practice sells, so this can include sundry pet-care items. Whilst these products – such as dog leads, toys and home accessories – may not expire, it can be easy to accumulate these to vast amounts if sales are not monitored. The combined financial value of this excess stock can be surprisingly high. It is therefore helpful to run both a stock valuation and a non-movement report on these products.
The practice management system can also help with the administration of inventory management, saving time for the whole team and limiting mistakes caused by human error.
Ordering can be completed with your main wholesaler through the PMS, and alerts can inform users when products are running low and when items are reaching the expiry date. This avoids money being wasted by discarding out-of-date products, protecting your bottom line.
Ambulatory vets can also benefit from scanning features linked to the PMS; this technology can keep track of what is in the car boot as well as in the practice.
Let’s take a look at two case studies on how data analytics has helped veterinary practices with inventory management:
A six-vet practice had relied on performing manual stock checks to monitor medication. The products that were used most frequently were counted weekly, with the lesser-used products monitored monthly or quarterly.
As part of the process, the team knew to put the oldest stock at the front of the shelf so that it would be used first; however, the busy realities of daily practice life meant that this system was hard to maintain, particularly when rushing between clients.
This oversight also led to multiple boxes of the same drug being open at the same time. The manual stock checks usually resulted in discarding unsatisfactory amounts of expired medication, and it was not uncommon for the practice to be out of some products in between counts.
By switching to PMS-led inventory management, the practice team were able to use the automatic stock check to monitor product levels as well as batch numbers, and users were alerted when a product was nearing expiry. As well as saving the team time, the new process significantly reduced the likelihood of being of out of stock, as well as ensuring that money was not wasted by throwing away discarded medication.
A small animal practice operates a pet shop alongside the busy reception area. Whilst the shop attracted a solid client base, the team were concerned about the seemingly high numbers of stock the shop held. They felt that it made the shop look untidy and it was hard to update and refresh products whilst overrun.
The shop manager ran reports on the practice’s PMS to assess the transaction history per product. They also measured overall stock levels, best sellers and slow-moving items.
By establishing the overstocked products, it was possible to temporarily freeze automatic orders on these items. Special offers and incentives for clients were introduced on these products to expedite stock turnover. Once appropriate stock levels had returned, repeating the same reports on a monthly basis ensured the shop was operating cost-effectively.
Using your PMS for inventory management not only saves significant time, but it also ensures that stock can be used and rotated efficiently. Furthermore, the reports generated through the software can set evidence-based, cost-effective decisions on future orders for your practice.
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