Leveraging Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR) to overcome the challenges of waste in the food and medical industries
In an ideal world, hospitals would have enough medical stock to treat every patient. Supplying medical inventory is a balancing act between having those supplies available to treat patients but not allowing time-sensitive supplies to expire. A stockout, or exhausted inventory, of medical supplies could lead to a life-or-death situation. At the same time, the expiration of excess inventory due to unnecessary hoarding of costly medical supplies can result in huge losses for hospitals. Similarly, customer service-oriented businesses like restaurants, hotels, and food chains should also have ample stock to meet their customer demands without risking food wastage, spoilage, and stockouts.
The Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR) solution process in Oracle Inventory Management Cloud was designed to overcome these challenges. The process allows you to count and replenish inventory that does not track item quantities and establishes a PAR location configuration on which replenishment docs are generated.
Avoid Inventory Management Issues with PAR
Let’s discuss some of the key areas of Inventory Management in the medical and food industries where the PAR solution can help:
Manage Critical Bulk Supply Stocks
In the healthcare, food, and automobile industries, there are a variety of items that are essential for daily functioning. The PAR Replenishment Solution can be used for bulk supplies that are not quantity tracked but are critical to the business. The PAR solution triggers a restock to occur without having to maintain and track on-hand stock across all PAR locations.
Ease and Accuracy of Replenishment
Business stock and supply demands may differ over time. Using data based on historical consumption, the PAR level replenishment tool allows you to update the replenishment level so that your level of inventory aligns with the demand. By using this lean inventory strategy, regardless of the change in demands, there would be no delays in sourcing supplies and reduced complexity for tracking goods that flow to and from business locations.
By using this PAR solution, you not only ensure the optimum storage of your inventory by eliminating a deadlock situation, but you also avoid storing excess stock and subsequent wastage.
PAR at Work
PAR Replenishment in Oracle Inventory Cloud is a complete solution for overcoming the challenges of managing inventory in industries such as healthcare and food, where inventory has expiration dates. Let’s examine a use case based on a hospital:
Identify the current challenges
The healthcare unit deals with numerous bulk items that are not quantity tracked. Managing and tracking the inventory is difficult because there cannot be an infinite number of expense purchases. Without proper inventory management in healthcare units, there is the potential for overstocking goods that can expire, which leads to waste and a negative financial impact.
Identify your PAR locations and adopt a suitable methodology
Based on your business, you can select the PAR locations that will need restocking and assign the replenishment method for that location. As the hospital and food industries deal with the greatest number of bulk supplies and based on this hospital use-case, the 2-Bin/Kanban Card Replenishment method would be best for bulk supplies. By utilizing this tool, you will be able to easily identify which of your products are being consumed or used quickly and will only restock as inventory is nearing depletion. If the parts needed for one item are rarely replenished, it is not a high-demand product. In addition to the 2-Bin method discussed above, there are other PAR methods including Count and Request, which can be used based on how your item is replenished.
Building handheld devices (Smart Devices) integrations
Users will identify and designate a smart device to count the items at each PAR location. Various smart devices can be used to count inventory. Third-party applications like RF Smart, Forest Matrix, and EZ Office Inventory integrate easily and are used to send replenishment requests to the Oracle platform. Oracle Cloud offers integration (OIC) options that ensure the seamless flow of data between the third-party application and the Oracle solution. After replenishment, the next step is to account and record the transaction. Oracle Cost Management Cloud provides the flexibility to define separate account combinations and accounting policies to track the PAR transactions easily.
Inspirage understands these challenges and is prepared to help your business achieve seamless supply chain operations using the Oracle Inventory PAR Cloud solution for the healthcare and food industries. If you are unsure about moving to Oracle Cloud due to gaps between your business requirements and Oracle’s Cloud offering, it is possible that we have already built a solution to bridge that gap. If we do not have a prebuilt solution to address your challenges, we can customize something to fit. We will do the work behind the scenes, so you can focus on growing your business. Please visit the Oracle Cloud Marketplace to see a complete listing of Inspirage Solutions.
As the Integrated Supply Chain Specialists, with recognition from Gartner, IDC, and winners of Oracle’s ERPM (Enterprise Resource Planning & Management) & Supply Chain Management Cloud Partner of the Year (Global) awards in recent years, Inspirage is uniquely qualified to be your success partner. Whether you are upgrading your on-prem system or have decided to move to the cloud where continuous improvement is built-in, our team is prepared to guide you on your transformational journey. Contact us to learn more.
