There is a universal truth about data points (i.e., an identifiable element in your data sets); if they don’t lead you in the right direction you are seeking it will be an exercise in futility. End of story!
For instance, if you want to know if you are wasting money on any of your products, services, or technologies you have been buying then your data points should point you to the exact products, services, or technologies being wasted through misuse, misapplication, or value mismatches.
Just spewing out all sorts of supply chain expense data because you can will only lead to confusion, extra work for your supply chain team, and misdirection in the short and long-term. Therefore, your goal when you collect data should be to gain wisdom that can be shared with your customers, not just dazzling them with statistics.
Five Steps to Cognitive Knowledge
To be truly meaningful and actionable the information you collect about your supply chain expenses needs to flow through these five steps of cognitive knowledge:
- Raw Data: Raw data in and of itself isn’t going to lead you in the right direction. It needs to be categorized, refined, and then enriched with additional information from varied (i.e., financial, clinical, and operational) sources.
- Information: Once you slice, dice, and corollate your raw data, your final product of this exercise will be information about trends and patterns in your products, services, and technologies’ usage. This step is mission critical to understanding your data.
- Knowledge: Knowledge is gained only when you research and investigate the anomalies (i.e., unfavorable trends and patterns) in your supply chain expenses. You can’t do this from behind your desk; you need to go out and interview customers and observe what they are doing.
- Understanding: Based on your research, interviews, and observations you can now understand why your customers are utilizing a product, service, or technology under investigation. This will lead you to the realization that some usage will be legitimate and some practices are wasteful and need to be changed.
- Wisdom: Wisdom is the culmination of the data, information, and knowledge that you have interpreted from your findings in the five-step cognitive knowledge process. You can then apply this knowledge gained to other situations where you have identified the same usage trends and patterns. It then becomes a powerful library of best practices you can share with others.
Identifying your supply utilization savings opportunities as we have demonstrated is a process, not a onetime event. Therefore, it will take time for your savings to unfold, but only if you become wise in the evaluation of data that you have available to you.
Make Sure Your Data Points are Leading You in the Right Direction
We are all looking for the magic bullet that will open the door to our clinical supply utilization savings. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet, but instead there is only the five-step cognitive knowledge process we have discussed that can and will open these doors for you. In doing so, you will gain wisdom that you can share with your staff, customers, and peers.