McKesson Corp., the largest pharmaceutical distributor in the U.S., is using the latest technology and Six Sigma to be ahead of the pack.
McKesson’s EVP and CIO, Randall N. Spratt shares with WSJ how his company is using technology to make its operations more efficient, to improve health care and to create a better environment for the company’s workers, dispelling the impression that many healtcare companies lag in terms of technology use.
This is how the interview started.
WSJ: McKesson makes 1.5 cents for every dollar it takes in on its distribution business, so efficiency is critical. Not surprisingly, the company relies on technology to make its warehouse operations more efficient. What is the process you go through to determine what technology might help?
Mr. Spratt: We have a large investment in a process-improvement methodology called Six Sigma. We employ somewhere north of 100 Six Sigma professionals, whose job is to take apart business processes. It could be as small as taking something off a truck and putting it on a shelf, or it could be as broad as what happens from the time we take an order to the time we ship an invoice. What they are trained to do is take a given business process, analyze it and take it apart to find where the highest variability is.WSJ: One technology that McKesson developed is a small computer that warehouse workers wear on their wrists and that is attached to a scanner on the worker’s finger. How did you come up with this system and what has it accomplished?
Mr. Spratt: It came from a Six Sigma analysis. Most errors in the warehouse came at the point of picking, which is taking something off a warehouse shelf, associating it with an order, and putting it in the right bin for shipping. The second-highest error rate came from stocking errors. If you stock a drug in the wrong place, the pickers have to search for it and they waste a lot of time. So they sat down and said how can we solve these problems.
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It’s pretty obvious that McKesson is trying to combine modern technology and Six Sigma. If they are able to do this successfully, then they’ll be a force to reckon with in the pharma/healthcare industry.
Source:
SmartBrief News
