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Five new skills to move to the next level of savings performance

A supply chain professional that gets the meaning of this change in the wind told me recently he has "Squeezed the last pennies out of his Band-Aids; now it’s time to discover new and better ways to save even more money."

In short, if you want to move the ball forward with your savings you will need to develop a new mindset. This mindset should enable you to look beyond price for savings and toward openness to novel and untried ideas. You will also need to acquire a heightened awareness for unlocking savings that are not visible to the untrained and unpracticed eye. To accomplish this awakening you will need to acquire a set of five new discovery skills that will propel you to the next level of savings performance for your healthcare organization.

Over the last few years researchers have discovered that innovative individuals, groups or organizations have five skills that they have in common that make them stand out from the crowd. This makes it possible for them to have breakthrough discoveries that have changed the way people think, do and act in creating innovation in the marketplace. I will now present these five new skills so you too can unlock even higher supply chain savings for your healthcare organization:

1. Associating. This is the ability to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated questions, problems, challenges or ideas from different fields. A good example of this associating skill would be the adoption of a retail grocery store concept, as one hospital system has done in their supply chain operations, to speed up deliveries, improve reliability, fix accountability and lower their cost.

2. Questioning. Peter Drucker, the late great business guru, once said, "The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right questions." That’s why great innovators and thinkers are always asking "Why" and "Why not?" and "What if?" It’s a habit that can turn your everyday conversations into a learning experience.

3. Observing. In Japan this skill is called "genchi genbutsu" or "going to the spot and seeing for yourself." We have all become tethered to our desks over the last few decades and have lost the art form that we used to call work-around-management. Observing is a vital discovery skill that has since been replaced with phone calls, e-mail and voice mails, to our detriment. Don’t let the moss grow under your feet if you want to gain new insight into your supply chain operations.

4. Experimenting. Conducting multiple tests, trials, pilot studies and experiments, just like scientists do, in every area of our supply chain operation should be the order of the day for all supply chain professionals. Yet, too often what I hear from supply chain professionals is that they are only experimenting on one new thing at a time, not dozens of new things all at one time. To be really innovative you must keep multiple balls in the air at one time, since some of them will turn out to be softballs.

5. Networking. Investing time and energy into finding and testing new and better ideas through networking with diverse individuals and groups gives innovators their discovery edge. Case in point: One of our IDN clients attends an industrial warehousing conference every year where he is surrounded with people, exhibits and workshops touting the most up-to-date thinking on warehousing operations. He then always comes home with a dozen new ideas that keep his innovating fires burning for another year.

As you can see, these five new discovery skills aren’t counter-intuitive, difficult to learn or even original in many respects. Consequently, any one can easily learn them without having a teacher or a coach to guide them through this course of action. Best of all, they don’t cost any money, to speak of, to put into practice. All it takes to get good at these skills is practice, practice, practice.