Business solutions

Ottawa Hospital transforms procurement using Oracle

OTTAWA – The Ottawa Hospital, a leading academic health centre, has implemented the Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including Oracle Purchasing, Oracle iSupplier Portal, Oracle iProcurement, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Inventory Management, Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Applications, Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Financial Management, to help automate its supply chain.

The Oracle E-Business Suite is helping the hospital accelerate procurement; reduce costs through improved terms, optimize vendor relationships and administrative efficiency; and reduce paper use.

The hospital worked with GHX, which provides services and solutions to automate the healthcare supply chain and improve business processes, to integrate GHX’s technology platform with the Oracle E-Business Suite, enabling end-to-end integration between the hospital’s procurement systems and those of its largest suppliers.

To date, the hospital has linked 52 of its largest medical and surgical supply vendors, representing annual spend of more than $60 million and 80 percent of the hospital’s medical and surgical supply budget, to its e-commerce system built on the Oracle E-Business Suite.

The hospital expects the system will help save more than $1 million annually once it is fully implemented. The Ottawa Hospital launched its automated supply chain as part of an Ontario Ministry of Finance (Ontario Buys) initiative, which is designed to introduce e-commerce technology to the healthcare supply chain to ensure high levels of care and efficiency.

The hospital’s e-commerce supply chain initiative uses electronic data interchange (EDI) through GHX to enable integrated processing of orders placed with virtually all vendors, eliminating the need for staff members to phone in or input daily orders and create paper-based purchase orders (POs) and invoices.

The new system accelerates the hospital’s requisition and purchasing process through automated transactions, which eliminates the need to manually enter orders each morning for the 52 vendors on the platform. This initiative saves the procurement department time and frees the team members to focus on more value-added activities, including procurement exception cases and contract management services.

End users also gain increased visibility into their purchase requests. With the Oracle E-Business Suite self-service applications, managers can check the status of a purchase request from their desktops, eliminating the need to contact the purchasing or logistics department for status updates.

The Ottawa Hospital recently automated delivery of supplies to surgical suites by integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with the hospital’s operating room clinical systems and its carousel picking system. To further extend visibility into its complex supply chain, The Ottawa Hospital has deployed Oracle Business Intelligence – enabling spend and vendor performance analysis to optimize the hospital’s supplier relationships and enterprise cost structure.

The hospital also plans to build a centralized warehouse, supported by Oracle Warehouse Management that will consolidate inventories across The Ottawa Hospital’s six sites into a single facility and facilitate swift replenishment of the hospital’s more than 1,000 supply carts.

“The Oracle E-Business Suite is fundamental to our ability to enable end-to-end integration with our largest medical and surgical supply vendors, helping to reduce costs and drive new efficiencies across our organization. Oracle Applications will also play an important role in our newest supply chain initiative, our consolidated warehouse,” said Cameron Love, Vice President, Planning, Support Services and Clinical Programs, The Ottawa Hospital.

“Through our e-commerce initiatives at The Ottawa Hospital, we are pioneering leading practices in supply chain automation that we hope will serve as a model for other healthcare organizations across the country as we pursue our shared goals of enabling high levels of care as well as improved operational efficiency.”