Healthcare
Properly managing medical equipment inventory is essential to the effectiveness of hospitals and healthcare facilities, and to their ability to appropriately provision health services. The inventory must be recorded and updated continually so that it provides an accurate picture, enabling the healthcare facility to avoid shortages, track expiry dates, and accurately plan and budget.
Drugs and Medicine have specified “end of life” dates, and therefore medical care facilities and pharmacies have limitations on the inventory levels of such products that they can maintain. This limitation, coupled with high demand for such products within short time frames, places pressure on suppliers to be ready to deliver within very short time frames.
Consequently, the healthcare providers, or “buyers” in this scenario, must receive schedule confirmations and advanced shipping notifications (ASN) from suppliers.
Scheduling management mechanisms that involve manual processing could result in impactful delays around goods receipt, order management, and deliveries.
One way by which healthcare providers can better manage inventory levels and scheduled supply of such items, is through an automatic order management system that generates orders directly from the buyer’s ERP system, sending them to the relevant suppliers within seconds. Suppliers could then immediately and easily respond to the order with PO confirmation and schedule confirmation, ideally using a variety of communications methods – a B2B interface, Web portal, Mobile App, or email.
To manage scheduling within such short time frames, suppliers should be able to effectively communicate with their customers (the healthcare facilities) around scheduling and should receive automated follow-up and reminders regarding required tasks and information.
Suppliers should also be able to send shipping notifications to their customers in advance, so that the latter can gain advance knowledge of the shipment details and possibly also create a draft Goods Receipt on that basis.
Financing options for every buyer and supplier
Dynamic Discounting: Capture risk-free returns
Real-time invoice approval expedites supply chain financing
Nipendo’s trade financing partners leverage these capabilities to offer suppliers on-demand, pre-approved early payment options.
“By providing real-time visibility to receivable worthiness and partnering with non-bank capital resources, Nipendo is expanding the range of available trade financing options at a time of great need.”
“Nipendo enables interoperability between different supplier communication solutions (for example, electronic data interchange [EDI], supplier networks and e-invoicing), allowing enterprises to rapidly achieve over 90% straight-through processing of all supplier invoices directly to their existing ERP systems.”
“Nipendo is the real deal when it comes supporting both application capability in P2P, such as e-invoicing and the connectivity or network layer itself.”
“Admittedly, we were initially reluctant to deploy Nipendo, fearing it would add to our work and possibly require the hiring of additional staff. We would likely not have done so had our customer not required us. However, after deploying the platform using a B2B connection, we realized significant benefit from it and now urge our customer to expand the platform’s utilization. We find ourselves spending far less time around invoice submission and, since we have full transparency into the process and into invoice and payment status, we no longer need to call the customer directly. Our business processes have improved significantly, and we’re better able to plan ahead.”
Chief Information Officer
“Before moving to Nipendo’s digital platform, we had to manually process hundreds of thousands of physical documents… we were sometimes late paying our suppliers… Nowadays the Electric Company receives the vast majority of invoices through Nipendo’s digital platform, which automatically examines them and provides intelligent validations… Once we started using Nipendo our work processes shortened and became more efficient. The number of people required to handle invoices was reduced and the company’s ability to comply with payment obligations to suppliers improved significantly. We’ve gotten rid of almost all of our large filing cabinets, freeing up a lot of office real estate, have done away with the exhausting filing activities and have almost completely eliminated the need to manually key-in data.”
Head of Accounting Division
“The Nipendo platform has enabled IAI to significantly improve supply chain efficiencies and supplier relations by creating transparency, and by automating the bulk of documentation along with the proper validations. This has freed up our team to address more value-add challenges, has eliminated data errors, and has enabled us to meet our SLA vis-à-vis suppliers and customers. Beyond the technology’s ability to address complex matters, the Nipendo team has demonstrated drive, flexibility, and creativity. All of this has encouraged us to move into new areas with Nipendo and to strive towards making it a one-stop-shop for IAI and its global suppliers.”
Deputy COO and VP Supply Chain
