Hybrent’s one-stop vendor shop saves PESC’s materials manager from spending her whole day shopping dozens of different vendor sites to order her supplies.
Washington state’s first accredited outpatient surgery center dedicated to eye care, The Physicians Eye Surgery Center, specializes in cataract surgery, LASIK and refractive surgery, and eyelid procedures. The eye center is also home to an optical dispensary, allowing patients to complete all steps of eye care, from pre-op appointments to picking out custom frames, in one location.
Challenges
Michelle M., PESC’s Materials Manager, is responsible for doing all the purchasing for the surgery center, clinic and optical dispensary. As the purchaser for the entire organization, Michelle would spend more than 20 hours a month purchasing supplies.
Michelle placed individual orders from more than 40 different vendors with some orders being as small as a single item. This required her to call or go to each supplier’s website, enter her login credentials, shop for the products and complete the check out – forty times. Each month, Michelle set aside one full workday and spent all eight hours of the day shopping individual suppliers’ websites and placing orders.
When the staff needed certain supplies, Michelle kept track of the requests by either writing them down or asking the staff to send her an email with the information. This left a lot of room for error as the notes could get lost or forgotten, not to mention the extra time staff would have to spend sending emails.
Michelle also had to manually enter PO’s into her accounting software, Sage 100.
She was excited to learn of the partnership between Hybrent and Sage, allowing the two systems to connect with each other and send invoices back and forth – saving her time and reducing manual work for Michelle.
Solution
The implementation of Hybrent was straightforward and lasted for six weeks for PESC. Michelle and her assigned implementation specialist met weekly over Zoom to complete a list of tasks, get her site up and running and connect Hybrent with her Sage 100 software. “The connection between the invoices in Hybrent and Sage 100 make things really easy for me,” Michelle said.
Michelle takes advantage of the mobile app to easily access the software on her phone. The easy to use mobile app allows her to stay connected if she’s out of the office and allows her to fulfill any needs of the staff from anywhere.
She also makes use of the mobile app while in the office. “I can use my phone for quick tasks like checking tracking on a shipment. There’s also times when I’m in the surgery center and the staff will ask when they last ordered an item or about other specific product information and I can easily look up the product in the Hybrent app and give them that information.”
In addition, instead of having to make notes about what supplies are needed or have clinical staff send her emails to remind her when she’s back to her desk to fill an order, she can open the app and add products to her cart instantly when she becomes aware that the product needs ordered.
Results
With Hybrent, Michelle no longer has to go through staff requests, check dozens of vendor websites and compare prices. The time she spends managing her entire purchasing process has decreased by 20 hours a month and on the days she creates orders for PESC, it now takes 1 hour instead of the 8 hours she previously had to spend.
Using Hybrent, Michelle is able to quickly order multiple products from different suppliers and process the order much faster. Gone are the days of going to individual vendor sites and placing separate orders. Now, she is able to view all her vendors in Hybrent, select the proper items and complete the checkout process one time.
The software also updates inventory and stock information from select vendors. “Being able to use Hybrent’s real-time interface has been really exciting. For example, the med-surg company that I order most of my supplies from has real time updates from their website so I don’t have to go to the supplier’s website to verify item prices or check if something is on backorder or in stock. That’s been one of my favorite added features I’ve seen over my time using Hybrent,” Michelle said.
“We signed on with Hybrent about 3 years ago and it’s been amazing to watch the changes made to the software since I’ve started working with it. You are constantly trying to innovate and add new features to improve the flow and as a user, the innovation is really nice to see,” Michelle continued.
“I find the invoicing module incredibly helpful,” said Michelle as she explained how she uses the invoicing feature to simplify her workflow. With the integration between Hybrent and her accounting software, Michelles tedious, manual tasks were reduced and she is able to spend more time on her other duties to keep the organization running smoothly.
Another feature Michelle has enjoyed using is the reporting. “The reports have always been user-friendly and the functionality continues to get better and better,” Michelle said. “The reports have been helpful to track exactly what I’m buying and ensure the data matches the information we keep in the building and in our accounting software. Hybrent is the easiest program to reconcile for a certain period of time. I just enter a period of time and the information is immediately at my fingertips.”
The reports have helped Michelle with her overall strategy to make sure she is purchasing appropriate products, pull information quickly and, best of all, the reports are easy to comprehend.