Global healthcare supplier increases product output and decreases labor hours through operations overhaul

What We Did

As new technology continues to disrupt the healthcare industry, companies are faced with outdated operational systems that simply can’t keep pace. That’s why a global pharmaceutical and medical product supplier reached out to West Monroe. We uncovered operational inefficiencies and developed new processes to help the supplier achieve more with less.

The Opportunity

This pharmaceutical and medical product supplier sought West Monroe’s expertise in operational productivity improvement and change management to transform inefficient processes into optimized workflows. The challenge? Developing a solution that could be easily scaled across the supplier’s entire North American network of over 25 distribution centers.

We put together a multidisciplinary team to:

• Identify ineffective work processes
• Drive productivity through a scalable workforce management initiative
• Empower internal teams with upskilling, training, and tools

An Undeniable Approach

With an understanding of the people, processes, and technologies that drive this industry—and workforce best practices—West Monroe set about transforming the supplier’s operations by:

• Interviewing organizational leaders to understand major roadblocks and prepare communication plans to ensure workforce alignment
• Identifying wasteful processes and redundancies across distribution centers to improve operational workflows across five initial sites
• Developing workforce management tools to increase employee accountability, employee engagement and enable the upskilling of frontline supervisors
• Coaching the client’s engineering team to quickly deploy the workforce management solution at its 20+ other North American distribution centers

The Output

We implemented a workforce management initiative to optimize operations and maximize productivity across the healthcare company’s network of North American distribution centers. Our team:

1. Created individual performance expectations for every role. The existing expectations were outdated and no longer aligned with current operations
2. Implemented cloud-based software designed to improve the mobile employee experience and create more seamless reporting dashboards to monitor employee productivity and product output
3. Taught an internal team the core methodologies needed to proactively identify process improvement opportunities and solutions moving forward
4. Developed a management framework to easily upskill operations supervisors and roll out the program across additional distribution centers

Returns You Can Measure

West Monroe streamlined the client’s North American operations through a flexible workforce management solution. Due to reduced labor costs and increased efficiencies, the framework has already led to significant results across the supplier’s distribution centers. The healthcare supplier is now experiencing increased product output of 11%, reduced overtime by 80%, and an average reduction of 16,000 labor hours per site.