SCL Health Uses Alteryx to Create a Data Infrastructure

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Kris Walker

Role:

Director, Systems and Analytics - Supply Chain

Company:

SCL Health

Overview of Use Case

The Supply Chain team at SCL Health partnered with their IT department to create a data infrastructure based on advanced analytics. Alteryx was essential in helping SCL manage their data transformation, resulting in annual cost savings, improved system data quality, and enhanced purchasing operations to support current and future supply chain needs.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

At SCL, our Supply Chain team's role is to manage our non-labor spend. When you think about where a hospital system spends its money, about 55-60% is on labor and benefits with the remainder being “non-labor spend.” We manage sourcing, care site operations, and we've also expanded into some non-traditional for supply chain areas.

Back in 2016, we were just past the merger of two healthcare systems and still trying to figure out how to optimize this newly-formed, larger organization. There were high expectations for our team, with a strong focus on integrating our work with clinicians and physicians to ensure alignment across units. It all boiled down to developing a framework for more insights, with analytics, to identify where to save money and reduce variation based on the data from our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), 3^rd Party sources, and other SCL Systems.

In 2017, while we were still finalizing how to drive maximum value for our department, the organization setup a new IT subgroup called the Analytics and Data Innovations (ADI) team. Their mission was to get the right data, to the right people and help empower them to make the right decisions. We setup an introductory meeting and during those conversations, they introduced us to Alteryx.

Describe your working solution

Performance Insights

When you're in supply chain, these are some of the types of questions we ask:

• What items did we purchase last year?
• What purchases are on-contract vs. off-contract?
• What inventory items turn the most? The least?
• How automated are our transactions (purchase orders, invoices, etc.) with our vendors?
• What transfers of product have we put into our perpetual inventory and when do we issue them out?

Before Alteryx, we spent hours preparing reports in Excel each month. While we always had basic reporting and metrics, it was difficult to access or limited in analytical scope. Metrics were presented in these clumsy Excel graphs that would be put into a workbook and emailed to the Supply Team leadership. I'm pretty sure about 9 times out of 10, the Supply Team leader deleted the email because they just weren't that interesting or effective. What we needed was a way to share insights with various stakeholders like hospital leadership, clinicians, and physicians.

Our goal was to create performance insights that were flexible and scalable to meet the needs of the various users in the organization. With Alteryx, we run a series of workflows to stitch item and pricing information from all our data sources, which feeds into Tableau. Our Tableau KPI workbook is updated daily and consists of enabled visualizations that allow any user to drill down and explore metrics at a more granular level. Alteryx has allowed us to derive data sets to fuel many of the KPIs we've developed, as well as analysis around our supply cost and utilization.

 

Routine Tactical Data Corrections

In addition to our performance insights, we also run 40-50 nightly workflows to perform routine tactical data corrections. These workflows allow us to improve the data within our own systems by pulling out information that’s incorrect, inconsistent, or doesn’t match our business rules. This data is then corrected by one of our master analysts, improving our operational efficiency and pricing model. These corrections have been incredibly important and helpful in allowing us to better track pricing changes.

At the end of the day, we run a three-minute Alteryx workflow that updates our ERP with information from our contract catalog and compares data pricing for millions of items. We abandoned the expensive annual license for the third-party software which failed to deliver and now have full control over how our price comparison occurs. A lot of hard work goes into it, but if you don't have the data, it's hard to know what to fix.

Project-Oriented Analysis & Support

In addition to our bigger projects, we use the Alteryx platform to support numerous initiatives within the scope of our team including:

• Prime Medical / Surgical Distributor Conversion
• Backorder management
• Population of purchase history for new product recall system

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Using Alteryx, we’ve transformed the way we analyze Supply Chain operations at SCL Health and created the framework for solving any business problem we encounter. Alteryx enabled us to organize our data in meaningful metrics, and as a result of advanced analytics, we have seen the following impact to our organization: 

• Eliminated unnecessary software subscription, saved $60,000
• Reduced purchase orders to wrong vendor, save $10,000 annually
• Improved price load accuracy by 40%
• Reduced invoice discrepancies by 17%, save $100,000 annually
• Reduced non-item file purchase order lines by 6%
• Increased spend under contract by 7%
• Reduced item file records by 36%

While we’ve had tremendous results with Alteryx thus far, in 2019, we plan to continue and expand our analytics footprint to target surgical data using our pre-existing infrastructure.

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here. Additionally, visit this link to watch the entire recorded session.