The Hidden Cost of Chaos

Let’s be honest: how much of the workday does your team spend putting out fires, entering sales data, entering request/order data, searching for inventory, and wrestling with the various systems you all use to get work done?

Multiple imperfect systems, lack of visibility, constant inventory wrangling, and cumbersome data entry all contribute to chaos. That kind of chaos costs many companies real money—in opportunities for current business as well as in innovation to drive future growth.

When the team is mired in daily tasks or burns half a morning tracking down inventory yet again, that’s chaos expressing itself in your operations. Add the ever-increasing pressure of competition and evolving regulatory oversight, and chaos—and complexity—are compounded.

Chaos exacts a high price in time, money, and potential. And that’s even before considering the imperative to grow, scale, and innovate. Making your systems work takes all your team’s time, leaving you collectively to only nibble at the edge of the big question: is there a better way?

The simple answer is yes. There is a way to streamline your business and innovate your processes. Doing so can drastically reduce data entry errors, allow you to repurpose key roles while controlling headcount with growth, and help you handle inventory challenges, including meeting demand with supply and optimizing under-utilized field inventory. In fact, digital transformation offers the promise of reinventing the way you do business from the inside out. Naturally, that begs the question: how? First, before diving further into the details, let’s define digital transformation. Then let’s examine how it looks when applied to how you’re currently doing business.

In a simple definition, digital transformation fundamentally changes how you do business, creates new and efficient ways of working and allows you to accelerate business growth and innovation. That’s because your people, who have been handling cumbersome administrative tasks and time-consuming manual processes, can now focus on doing what digital tools and systems can’t. The removal of old constraints opens up new possibilities.

That’s all well and good—fantastic, even—on a theoretical level, but how does digital transformation actually look when it’s applied to an existing business? And how about industries that are ripe for but as yet untouched by digital transformation? You already know that digital transformation, for instance, has transformed how we consume music, share photos, and shop for consumer goods. But how about the orthopedic implant manufacturing setting?

Well, to illustrate that point, let’s consider a common process in your business: case management. First, a case gets scheduled and completed. The implants used in the surgery are put on a sales order and that order is submitted. Ask yourself this:

• Do you know about cases before they happen?
• Do your customer service people have to manually enter the info submitted from the field into your system for capturing revenue?
• Do they have to re-enter everything just to generate a replenishment order?
• Are fulfillment people dealing primarily in paper?
• Does your management have a hard time compiling historical sales and usage data? Or is it available to everyone in a few simple steps?
• Do you have a hard time accurately pinpointing what inventory is where in the field?
• Is all relevant information—from part number to surgeon to case history and implant usage—available and easily searchable?
• Are items automatically submitted for replenishment, or is this a separate step? If it’s separate, how much time does this burn?

How many questions can you answer yes to? How many do you answer with no?

Have you ever stopped to think that this this entire process can be a repeatable loop? Without the chaos of multiple systems and heavy reliance on data entry, your team would have more time and capacity to focus on more effective and innovative work—the kind of work that can’t be done by a system. That’s:

• Building more cooperative relationships between your sales force and customers.
• Contending with only the most complex problem variants, rather that routine things every time.
• Providing valuable support to surgeons to cement loyalty.
• Better inventory utilization.
• More informed decision-making.

ImplantBase is a leader in digital transformation for the orthopedic implant industry. Its platform provides manufacturers of every size with a unique cloud-based solution that transforms how the business operates on every level and across your critical functions of finance, sales, and operations. That means bringing automation—and revolution—to scores of mission-critical business processes, so that your team can stop fighting chaos and start driving improved performance.

The hidden cost of chaos isn’t going to be hidden much longer. In fact, those companies who seize the imperative and digitally transform are going to see advantages—immediate ones, like a reduction in Days Sales Outstanding and ROI, and long-term ones in competitive edge—are going to be those who innovate and endure.

If you’re ready to embrace the future, ImplantBase can help. Give us 30 minutes to assess your performance and we’ll show you a roadmap to digital transformation.