A 12-hospital system is jumping two tall hurdles in the supply chain industry: Invoice match exceptions and delays in contract renewals.
George Godfrey, chief supply chain officer and corporate vice president of financial shared services for Baptist Health South Florida, told Becker's a recent partnership reduced his department's email volume by more than 50%.
"Supply chain people are constantly managing actions and the way that we manage actions in today's world, typically, is through email," Mr. Godfrey said. "The issue becomes, you got massive amounts of data."
To streamline customer relationship management data into a simple dashboard, the Coral Gables, Fla.-based system chose Salesforce. The application automatically creates a case and deploys follow-up communication if needed. Once a case is closed, the tool will track the proof of delivery and a credit memo.
Invoice match exceptions have been prevalent for years, and most providers are forced to tolerate them, according to Mr. Godfrey. For these exceptions and contract renewals, "it's a lot of go, stop, go, stop," he said.
Baptist Health South Florida reviews more than 5,000 contracts annually. Each contract is now presented in a dashboard, along with its communication status.
The system has used the match exception tool for about three years, and it launched the contract renewal application in 2023.
Last year, Baptist Health South Florida experienced over 30,000 match exceptions and sent more than 90,000 emails. They achieved a 28% reduction in contract renewal backlogs. This success frees up employees' time for strategy and high quality work, he said.
Another advantage of the technology is that users can utilize the data in quarterly business reviews with suppliers.
For example, a supply chain employee can have the receipts and tell a supplier, "You overcharged us hundreds of thousands of dollars last year, [and] your average days to respond as we're trying to pay you and fix these invoices match exceptions is 30 days," Mr. Godfrey said.
On average, it takes 11 days for the system to close a match exception case.