Inventory Insights

My Role:

Product Designer

Platform:

Web

Timeline:

Feb-July 2021

My Role:

UX/UI Design, Research

Platform:

Native iOS & Android

Timeline:

2022

Context:

AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora) is a pharmaceutical manufacturer and retailer. They aimed to create a symbiotic relationship with hospitals, providing inventory analytics and therefore receiving drug data, requiring the hospital to follow compliance contracts without audits. AB had an outside agency conduct user research, which I supplemented with a competative analysis of similar tools and used to inform my designs.

Project Goals:

Provide a drug inventory analytic tool for free to incentivize hospitals to share their drug data.
Make maintaining drug stock easier by defining meaningful metric data to tie into AmerisourceBergen's Intelligent Suggested Order.

Product Value Proposition:

Provide analytics across all Drug Dispensing Machines regardless of brand.
Users no longer need to switch between software to see drug movement.
View health of machines to provide actionable information based on drug metrics.

Basic User & Process info

Key user roles:

Buyers: Look at inventory levels to place orders, decide what to buy

Inventory Mangers: Pay attention to inventory levels, are focused on drug performance
Pharmacy techs: Carry out tasks such as refilling and changing min/max levels

Drug Inventory Process:

New shipments of pharmacuticals are loaded into the carousel in the central pharmacy.
Drugs are transported from the carousel to cabinets in different locations of the hospital.
Nurses take drugs from the cabinet to administer to patients.

Product Strategy

The main focus was to provide return on investment for the hospitals.

Hospitals have compliance contracts with AB- ex: “We promise to buy 80% of our drugs from you.” However, enforcing this requires an expensive and relationship dampening audit process that AB doesn’t often do, so hospitals can get away with not strictly adhering to the contract.
If they share their data, AB will be able to see if they are following the contract or not. The product we deliver has to provide enough value that it out weighs whatever benefits they are receiving from breaking the compliance contract.
Ideas on how to do this:
- Labor savings from the bottom 10% of employees by creating a more efficient management process
- Provide unique tools to the top 1% of hospital system leadership to give them better insight on what’s happening to the drugs in their hospital system.
- Intelligent Suggested Order also provides value, but we’re in a chicken or egg situation. The data in this tool will improve ISO, and eventually tie into the product, but not for a while down the road.