American SurgiSite is a leader in ophthalmic ambulatory surgery center consulting, accreditation, value-added services and management. Located in New Jersey, American SurgiSite supports 8 ophthalmic Ambulatory Surgery Centers nationwide.
Katie Negron, Purchasing Department Manager, oversees American SurgiSite’s purchasing department. Her team is responsible for supply chain management across all health centers within their organization. Among the 5 locations that Negron’s team purchases for, they manage 95 vendors, 130 physicians, and 150 nursing and staff members.
Katie and her staff recognized a need for change in their procurement process. Before Hybrent, each week clinical staff at each location would add supplies they needed to be ordered to an Excel spreadsheet before submitting the spreadsheet to the central purchasing department. This process was time consuming and often included supplies that were outside of the item formulary.
Negron’s team would then review each spreadsheet and do their best to search and compare items from a multitude of vendors to find cost-effective, quality supplies. This inefficient process was laboring and difficult to maintain as the organization grew. They needed a solution to streamline their accounting process and consolidate ordering since current efforts made it difficult to keep track of and manage order requests.
“Each center is unique because of the different doctors and their specific supply wants and needs, based on the surgeries being performed,” said Negron. “The Purchasing Department does its best to work with each facility’s supervisors, nurses, and staff.”
With their manual procurement process, the team struggled to reach their goal of a streamlined ordering process and buying supplies in bulk to capture savings. The Purchasing Department needed an easier way to shop and purchase supplies for all the facilities being managed under American SurgiSite. The system being used before wasn’t able to handle the magnitude of orders being submitted from each facility and didn’t have the inventory management capabilities that were needed.