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Toyota has hundreds of locations, employs close to 300,000 employees worldwide and has about $61 billion dollars in supply chain costs. These operating characteristics, in many ways, mirror the breadth, depth and scope of our own healthcare industry. We all should pay close attention to what this global leader in speed, waste reduction and improving quality is doing because everyone wins when you have a smaller footprint, better performance and shave 3 percent, 6 percent or even 9 percent off your operating cost!

We have found that healthcare organizations also have millions of dollars of waste in their supply chain just waiting to be pruned if only supply chain professionals knew where to look for these hidden costs. In fact, supply chain managers can have a huge impact in reducing waste to zero at their healthcare organization by focusing their waste elimination efforts on these eight areas of their operations.

1. Waiting Time for information, supplies, signatures or people is a time waster that can and must be eliminated. I can remember when I was a materials manager I did away with my receivers obtaining signatures for packages they were delivering to departments because it was taking three hours a week to hunt down someone to sign for packages. And guess what, it didn’t cause any operations issues going forward!

2. Overproduction of linen packs, instrument packs, kits and trays will only lead to outdated, damaged or spoiled products on your shelf. A much better method to employ to avoid this waste from occurring is the "just-in-time" philosophy tied to your actual case load for any given day. No more, or no less!

3. Rework like requisitions with wrong information, pricing, part numbers, etc., can overwhelm your buyers with unneeded extra work. Educating your customers on why you need this information to speed up their purchases is usually the right answer to this big time waster.

4. Extra Motion when your storeroom isn’t organized efficiently can add additional unneeded steps for your staff to pick, pull and deliver. To avoid these extras steps you need to sort what’s not needed, neatly store what is needed, clean and shine the area, standardize the layout and sustain the effort.

5. Transportation Time can be greatly reduced in many areas of your operations if you take the time to reorganize your transportation routes. A good starting point for this endeavor is to actually time your current routes, then time a number of alternate routes for your exchange and linen carts, and mail deliveries, in order to find the optimal routes that will give you the lower transportation time – every time.

6. Processing Time of anything and everything you do can be dramatically reduced to a bare minimum. Take for instance requests that I get all of the time for 1041 forms to validate my legal business structure from accounts payable departments. This process time could easily be cut in half if hospitals requested this 1041 form before they issue their first purchase order to any new vendor.

7. Inventories are rampant with waste. I’ve seen a hospital that ordered four years worth of patient booklets that you know will be destroyed before they are used. Or an operating room holding $2 million dollars worth of inventory that hasn’t had any activity in two years. There is no excuse for this happening and it is waste in the purest sense of the word!

8. Intellects are wasted the most. Tap into the brain power, knowledge and experience of all your hospital staff in all of your decisions. This will make your operations better than good.

These eight waste eliminators, I believe, are a good jumping off point for you to start your own "Stop Waste Program" in your supply chain on your journey to zero waste.