Savings Beyond Price™
Innovative Supply Savings and Quality Solutions That Work
by Strategic Value Analysis® in Healthcare
Did You Know...?
That Value Analysis Was Developed Back In the 1940's After World War II as a Way to Find Lower Cost but Higher Quality Alternative products and methods. This was Due to the Lack of Material Resources At The End of The War.
Savings Beyond Price -Weekly eNewsletter - October 7, 2009
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
How to Monitor and Control your VA Projects
Greetings,
Saving money or improving quality is a good thing with your value analysis projects, but monitoring and controlling them is even more important to ensure that the savings or improvements have really happened.
We have found that there are FOUR essential project management tools to establish a sound foundation to do so as follows:
1. Status Report
Requiring your VA project managers to give a short and precise project status report on their projects every two weeks is the best way we know of to make certain that your VA projects are on time, on budget and on target. We all have the tendency to procrastinate, therefore this technique reduces the possibility that your project managers will drag there feet on your VA projects.
2. Savings Baselines
All of your VA saving projects should have a targeted savings goal established prior to the start of any and all VA projects to measure the success of your projects. This will enable you to see clearly if your savings goals or improvements have been met. For instance, if your hospital is buying new IV pumps you need to know how much savings will be generated by this modification in your practices. Otherwise, how would you know if you met or missed your savings target?
3. Project Variances
Using your savings baseline as your target you need to measure, after a project is completed, how much savings were achieved on each and every project that you assigned to your value analysis teams. This should be an easy computation for you if you are keeping records on your project’s progress.
4. Project Audit
Any VA project that misses its savings target by 10% or more should be audited to find out why. The reason for this course of action is three-fold:
1. You could be leaving money on the table untouched.
We have found that 98% of the time when a VA project misses their targeted savings that the VA project manager assigned to the project didn’t do a thorough job of uncovering the savings. When this happens you need to send back these projects to your project managers so they can squeeze even more savings dollars from them.
2. You need to learn why your original savings estimate was wrong, so that you can correct it in the future.
Too often we find that the initial data used to estimate the targeted savings was WRONG, therefore the savings calculation was wrong going into the projects. You need to learn from these mistakes!
3. You need to build a knowledge database of what can goes wrong with your VA projects, so that you can fix them.
The best way to do so is to have a project debrief with your VA project managers to understand the challenges that they faced during their projects. It might be that they didn’t have enough time to do their project or they didn’t have the management support for it to succeed. Whatever the reason you need to know why your VA projects aren’t meeting their stated goals and remove them on the next go around.
It all comes down to this! Successful value analysis teams develop a repeatable VA SUCCESS model for their VA teams to follow in order to make certain that each and every VA project will have an equal chance of success. These four tools that I have shared with you to monitor and control your VA projects should be integrated into your own VA SUCCESS model as the four steps that will lead you to a successful project closure on every VA project that you undertake.
Your Partner In Savings Beyond Price™,
Robert T Yokl
Chief Value Strategist
Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare
1-800-220-4274
P.S. We just released an enhanced version of our Enterprise Utilizer® Dashboard for Systems and IDNs to make your savings job easier. If you would like to read more about it please just click on our recent Press Release to get the details.
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