Recently, Becker’s Hospital Review gathered health system leaders for two panel discussions on the current state of the healthcare supply chain as part of a Supply Chain Forum, which was sponsored by Cardinal Health.
One panel, Supply Chain: Navigating Change, Using Technology to Increase Productivity and more, featured Pete Bennett, senior vice president of global planning at Cardinal Health. Automation is one area of focus for Cardinal Health when looking towards investing in the future.
Cardinal Health recently launched 33 robotic process automation (RPA) bots to look at the estimated time of arrivals every day. This helps Cardinal Health provide more clarity and accurate information to customers about inbound products. “Our employees in supply planning could get through about 2,000 lines of purchase orders per day,” Bennett said, “and we had to figure out how to process 8,000 lines of data a day. The automation has been incredibly successful. Bots collect 8,000 lines of data each day and we no longer have frustrated employees trying to keep up with PO management.” On the warehouse side, Cardinal Health recently piloted autonomous mobile robots in some of its distribution centers. The employees loved the robots and the technology drove greater efficiencies, a stronger safety culture and improved quality.