At BLUEPRINT 4D 2023, Ellen Dadlani, a PeopleSoft customer from AdventHealth shared her PeopleSoft Inventory Tips and Tricks.  AdventHealth is non-profit healthcare system made up of over 82,000 employees and physicians scattered across 51 hospital campuses in 9 states. On average, AdventHealth manages 7.1 million patient interactions.

AdventHealth emphasizes four performance standards for all employees: Keep Me Safe, Love Me, Make It Easy, and Own It. These standards inform all business decisions. In the case of inventory management, the team prioritized making it easy on the facilities and helping them own their data.

AdventHealth’s PeopleSoft Installation

To understand AdventHealth’s PeopleSoft Inventory strategy, it may be helpful to understand AdventHeath’s PeopleSoft production environment.  The details of their environment are available in the image below.

Cost Balancing WorkCenter

With so many different facilities, AdventHealth used to struggle with accurate data and early issue identification. To solve this issue, the team sought help in the form of the Cost Balancing WorkCenter.

The PeoplSoft Cost Balancing WorkCenter is used to help identify and resolve inventory and accounting issues earlier in the reconciliation process. For AdventHealth, this tool improves their PeopleSoft inventory productivity by saving time and reducing clicks in navigation. It also offers a personalized view and a one-stop identification and processing of issues. Lastly, the Cost Balancing WorkCenter increases healthy communication between supply chain and finance. Previously, everyone worked in silos. Now, the teams communicate and understand the importance of making sure on-hand counts are correct, since debits and credits are created from that count.

Within the Cost Balancing WorkCenter, AdventHealth monitors eleven alerts:

1. Putaway Not Completed
2. Demand Not Depleted
3. Transactions Not Costed
4. Insufficient Qty for Depletion
5. Other Issues for Not Costed
6. Accounting Lines Not Created
7. Accounting Line Errors
8. Accounting Not Posted to GL
9. Item Cost Update Tolerance
10. Negative Inventory
11. Negative Weighted Average

For definitions of each alert, see the chart below.

Note: These are the most important areas for AdventHealth, but you may set up more or fewer alerts depending on your unique system.

Improving Inventory and PWAC

After identifying issues with the Cost Balancing WorkCenter, AdventHealth set out to improve accuracy of inventory and PWAC.

They started by asking the facilities to do frequent cycle counts, at least once per quarter. (Some items required more frequent counting. During COVID, P95 masks were done daily.) With regular scheduling of these counts, on-hand accuracy improved.

Teams were also challenged to reduce express issues with par optimizations, adjusting storage for individual departments or bumping up supplies for weekends (when supply chain members may not be present). Overall, they wanted to be more strategic in increasing operational efficiency and improving inventory convenience.

AdventHealth also revised a daily/weekly checklist for supply chain team members:

• Review Cost Balancing Workcenter
• Correct Staged Putaway Errors
• Review Negative on-hand quantity
• Review Negative PWAC

Match Exception Dashboard

Next, AdventHealth enhanced their PeopleSoft inventory performance with a match exception dashboard. The reporting team created a custom OBIEE dashboard to 1) combine data from multiple databases, 2) include available payment discounts, and 3) roll up at the corporate level, regional level, city level, and supplier. This enabled them to determine the root cause for match exceptions. Between the combined dashboard and monthly meetings, they reduced match exceptions immensely.

Glyphs and Shortcut

Lastly, the AdventHealth team works with Glyphs and Shortcuts.  AdventHealth recommends adding Glyphs to your system so you can review extra information with a simple right-click. Glyphs help you navigate to related pages, reduce keystrokes, and equip you to make strategic decisions. Note: This is access driven. If you do not have access to that page “No Actions Available” will appear.

Additionally, AdventHealth recommends these shortcuts for cost accounting configuration:

• ALT + 7 – Insert Row
• ALT + 8 – Delete Row
• ALT + 1 – Saves Transaction
• ALT + 2 – Returns to Search Page

To learn more PeopleSoft Inventory tips from AdventHealth, watch part one of this BLUEPRINT 4D presentation recording: ERP PeopleSoft Ignite Session.