Success Stories
Case Study: Americas Urgent Care
At America’s Urgent Care, JumpCart is the Right Prescription for Inventory Management
The Challenge
America’s Urgent Care provides high-quality, community-based urgent healthcare services at seven locations across Ohio and Florida. Each location is overseen by a manager who has significant autonomy to tailor services to the needs of each community in order to provide superior healthcare services. Unfortunately, that autonomy has also led to costly inventory control problems for the company.
“Our seven locations are run by managers with seven different personalities,” notes John Brunner, Manager of Diagnostic Services at America’s Urgent Care corporate office. “So, inventory levels of medical supplies across our locations ranged from ‘always running out’ to having three-year supplies of everything.” The company struggled as it simultaneously was paying extra charges for small rush orders while also carrying excessive, expensive inventory.
The company’s inventory control processes had other problems as well. First, there was the manual supply-ordering process: managers would perform frequent physical inventory counts, write down what was needed, enter their orders in QuickBooks®, and then fax the orders to suppliers. Second, contract compliance was poor: doctors could ask managers to order any item from any vendor, and managers felt pressured to accommodate these requests. What’s more, corporate staff had no centralized view of inventory levels, except when an annual physical inventory was performed across all of the company’s locations.
The Answer
Knowing he needed to get control over the organization’s growing inventory management problem, but provide flexibility and autonomy to the remote sites, Brunner and the management team at America’s Urgent Care began investigating products. They looked at healthcare-specific inventory control systems from well-known vendors, such as McKesson and PSS. But all of these alternatives had two major drawbacks: First, they limited the company to buying products from a single vendor. If they wanted to change vendors or buy from multiple suppliers, they would have to change their inventory management system every time they changed vendors. Second, vendor-based solutions didn’t offer integration to America’s Urgent Care’s financial application to automate the purchase order process and ensure contract compliance.
“JumpCart has all of the inventory management features you need. We liked the fact that JumpCart gave us the freedom to choose our vendors, and it was one of the few systems that could push information directly into QuickBooks,” says Brunner.
In addition to providing multi-vendor support and integrating with existing financial systems, JumpCart is a hosted solution that utilizes compact, easy-to-use keyfob scanners. There’s no software or hardware to buy and it’s easy to maintain because it requires minimal IT effort and support. It’s an inventory management solution that is affordable and quick and easy to implement.
“I’m always leery of online models due to the monthly fee—but JumpCart is priced the same regardless of the number of locations, which is great for a multi-facility company like America’s Urgent Care, or even a single hospital with multiple departments and inventory locations. What’s more, because we have seven locations each with a different ownership structure, it was critical that JumpCart didn’t require us to maintain a single QuickBooks file. It gave us the ability to write inventory usage data to any QuickBooks file we designated. And, the other systems we looked at didn’t offer reporting capabilities nearly as robust as what JumpCart provides,” Brunner added.
America’s Urgent Care implemented JumpCart at their newest location first. The company then rolled it out to their other facilities on a monthly schedule, incorporating lessons learned at each site.
“JumpCart is a great system, but is heavily reliant on end user buy-in, so the flexibility and ease-of-use of the system was critical,” notes Brunner. “JumpCart gives our users the option of tracking supplies into and out of inventory by scanning shelf labels or scanning a catalog at the nurses’ station. Some items we scan on each use, others only when the last item is taken from a box. We really like the flexibility of the system.”
The Results
America’s Urgent Care has realized a number of benefits from the JumpCart inventory management system.
Cut requisition-to-order cycles by 75%, invoice payment cycles by 50%
By eliminating manual physical inventory and ordering processes, JumpCart has reduced requisition-to-order time by 75%, freeing location managers to spend time on more strategic activities. In place of the old, inefficient manual order process, managers now simply scan labels, plug the JumpCart scanner into their PCs, review the Order Summary screen, and place orders for needed items with a single click.
“Before we started using JumpCart, site managers had to manually type each item and quantity into QuickBooks for every order, as well as entering item receipts,” says Calvin Cyrus, Manager of Finance at America’s Urgent Care. “By automating the order process and automatically updating QuickBooks, JumpCart saves our company almost $5,000 per site—more than $36,000 per year across the organization—in order processing costs.”
Because JumpCart automatically closes out purchase orders on delivery, Cyrus no longer has to call each manager to verify that orders have been delivered before approving payments. He estimates that doing away with time-consuming manual steps has cut invoice payment processing time by 50%. “By eliminating the `detective work’ I used to have to do to verify deliveries, the system also saves our corporate accounting group nearly $1,000 per year in payment processing costs.”
Reduced stock-outs and inventory carrying
By establishing and enforcing minimum and maximum inventory levels by item, the company has virtually eliminated stock-outs while dramatically reducing its inventory carrying costs.
The new system also enables America’s Urgent Care to take advantage of vendor rebates. “JumpCart lets us strike the right balance between inventory levels and order quantities,” notes Brunner. “Many vendors offer year-end rebates based on average order size; now, we are benefiting from those rebates instead of paying extra for small orders.”
Identified new opportunities to increase overall company performance.
JumpCart’s reporting features give company management complete visibility into inventory status information that it never had before. With just a few clicks, corporate staff can now view current company-wide or location-specific inventory levels. If one site does somehow run low on a critical item, the manager can easily check availability from other nearby locations.
“We used to have to physically check invoices against inventory levels in order to calculate our usage on any item,” says Brunner. “Now, all of that information is easily reported from JumpCart. The system gives me complete visibility into measures such as rebate status, item usage by location and current and historical inventory levels. It provides excellent management information. For example, it’s easy to spot trends such as seasonal usage of items like flu vaccine and adjust our inventory levels and reorder quantities appropriately.”
Eliminated rogue spending and cut labor costs
Renegade buying has been eliminated, allowing the company to negotiate more favorable contracts with its preferred vendors. With JumpCart, Brunner is able to specify approved items and vendors in the system. Doctors still have the freedom to buy specific items from other vendors when necessary, but the company now has a formal new item approval process in place, which helps control procurement costs.
In addition, the company has achieved labor savings from the ability to import vendor pricing changes directly into the system each quarter rather than manually entering all updates.
“JumpCart gives us the flexibility to continue to have managers do the buying for each location, but we now manage inventory parameters and invoice payment centrally,” says Brunner. “At the corporate level, we now have better information on inventory costs, trends, stock levels, item usage, patient count and other measures, and much greater control over inventory management. JumpCart is the ideal system for our growing, multi-location enterprise.”