Jeff Cox, Dennis Allam, and Sue Patton stand in the store room at Lancaster General Hospital.
In the fall of 2015, the Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health store room temporarily moved its operations to the Suburban Pavilion to accommodate construction of the Frederick Building. With the construction of the Frederick Building complete, the store room could move back to its original location – 7,500 square feet in the basement of Lancaster General Hospital.
As the team prepared to return to their former-home, Dennis Allam, supervisor of General Stores, Jeff Cox, logistics specialist, and Sue Patton, supply coordinator, led the Visual Management charge to increase efficiencies, which supports LG Health’s quality and safety goal by ensuring supplies arrive to patient floors as quickly as possible.
Visual Management is the continuous work to ensure anyone can walk into any work place and visually understand the current situation. The 5S is the Continuous Improvement tool used to achieve Visual Management. Its name comes from the five s-words that make up the process: Sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain.
“Our store room is organized to mirror a high-functioning warehouse,” said Allam.
Home to more than 1,100 hospital supplies, the store room is carefully divided with more than 100 metal rack systems, each labeled with an aisle, a section within the aisle, and a shelf number.
“We looked at how we could make it easier for someone to locate items if they had not worked in this type of atmosphere before,” said Cox, who has previous experience in warehouse logistics. “The location of every item was thought out.”
In addition to the location of each item, the team designed the space in a way that requires the least amount of duplicate work.
“We followed the path that our store room clerks take when fulfilling orders to determine how we can streamline that process.” said Allam. “Now when a clerk enters the store room, they can fulfill the order on a purposeful track that winds through the aisles – starting with the largest and heaviest items, which can go on the bottom of the cart – and moving up to the smaller pieces.”
The team fulfills more than 6,000 orders for the hospital and surrounding locations every month.
“The more commonly needed items are placed in a space in the front of the store room – in a special location to further help improve our delivery times,” added Patton.
Allam credits the success of the store room’s work flow to the entire team coming together to offer their opinions. “We may have lead the project, but the entire group shared their ideas or thoughts on how to address each of the five S’s – and of course, our Performance Improvement coach Amie was incredibly helpful,” he said.