In her recent Meet the Team blog, Advisory Council member Nicole Clausen shared great insights on how far veterinary inventory management has come since she joined the profession. You can read that blog here!
Now, Nicole is sharing her tips and best practices for creating an efficient and successful inventory management system in your veterinary practice. Please keep reading for her expert insights on finding and stocking medications, what to look for in a pharmacy partner, the foundation of every sound inventory system, and more.
What is your strategy for teaching somebody about finding a medication they can’t find but need to get for their practice?
First and foremost, I always recommend having a good communication plan so that if an item goes on backorder, you can immediately alert your team. But then, I always recommend having a mix of vendors and distributors, hopefully, a mix of smaller and larger ones, so that you might be able to find a product from another partner.
But if it’s completely unavailable, start by looking at alternatives, whether compounded or a similar product. I often recommend that the inventory managers chat with the veterinarians or the whole care team to find out who they know and ask other practices what they are using.
What about expired medications? How do you handle those? What's the best approach?
Some expired products, emergency medications, or unnecessary items are almost like the cost of doing business because you have these expired medical or emergency medications that will probably expire each time unless you’re a larger practice. You don’t want to be without them, so you replace them.
But if you have other expired products that aren’t necessarily for emergencies, maybe just low-selling products, I like to evaluate expiration dates regularly. And I like to look at expired products about three months before expiration. Once it does expire, then I evaluate:
- Does it actually make sense to keep it on the shelf anymore?
- Do we need to get a smaller container size next time?
- Do we need even to carry this anymore?
- Does it need to be discontinued or moved to an online pharmacy?
If something that is not an emergency product expires, I definitely like to evaluate it first before repurchasing the same thing again.
When you use a mix of vendors or partners, what are your top considerations? What do you consider a qualified partner?
I always start with what they offer. Do they have a wide offering? What is their cost, and what is their customer service like? When I was an inventory manager, having great customer service was super important to me because a lot of times, I would lean on those partners to help when there was a backorder situation or help me find a product that I wasn’t sure where to find.
Other questions or considerations include:
- What does their shipping time look like?
- Do they offer promotions, discounts, or alternative financing options?
- What is their communication or customer service like?
- How easy is it to order from them?
- Are there any barriers to the ordering process? This could include a cumbersome or confusing website.
- A personal value of mine is sustainability, so what is their packaging like, or do they have sustainability and environmental impact in mind?
What does the most successful inventory management process look like to you?
That’s a good question. So, there are really two goals when it comes to inventory:
- To have what the practice needs on hand for patient care.
- To balance that with the profitability of the practice.
So, to me, an efficient or best inventory process is one where you can easily know what you need to order or what’s running low. You can easily find things.
It should just feel easy and frictionless. It’s not always going to be easy, but it should feel effortless. When you set up those systems, you’re always going to have bumps in the road because inventory is so dynamic. But if you have a foundation of these systems, you’ve set out to make it much easier for you.
Inventory Management Guide
Learn how to improve your practice’s inventory processes. We’ll share important considerations for software tools and key reminders for your team in this guide!
If someone is taking the first steps to put an inventory management system in place, what is the most important piece of that foundation?
Hands down, reorder points are the most important part of the process. There’s kind of three different components to it.
- The first is your reorder point, or the low quantity, and what low means. We’re not shaking bottles to see what’s low, we’ve actually quantified it. A lot of times, if you ask every person in your practice what low means for Gabapentin, you’re probably going to get a different answer for every single person. We can quantify what low means with reorder points based on previous purchases or sales history. For example, on average, we sell 500 capsules every so often, so we can predict that we’ll sell another 500 in that same time period.
- Second is reorder quantity, which is how much we should order at a time.
- The third is having some reorder flag to know when you are low without somebody having to write it down. You can use your software to flag different reorder tags.
There are many different ways you can know when something is low, but reorder points will be the single thing that changed the game for me. And it has changed the game for so many practices that I have taught.
When I can help the inventory manager feel more confident in what they’re doing, it really impacts the practice positively, financially, and from a patient care perspective. When you have a system in place to know when something needs to be reordered and how much needs to be reordered, the likelihood of running out decreases.
Thanks for sharing these great tips, Nicole!
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