Adopting a proactive master data management process is essential for organizations both large and small to keep expenses associated with incorrect item pricing and payment information from spiraling out of control.

All large organizations struggle to maintain clean master data but in healthcare the task is even more difficult given the prevalence of GPO contracts and the fluidity of items used to deliver the highest quality care. Poor maintenance practices will result in increased operating expenses over time and often lead to cumbersome and very expensive “Data Cleansing” projects to try to regain control of the master data. DDR’s SupplyForms^™ application will help your organization break that cycle

SupplyForms^™ is a sophisticated, web based application that is used to support centralized master data maintenance for large organizations. The first step is the creation of a centralized master data maintenance group that should be primarily comprised of Supply Chain professionals within the organization. Next, the organization must remove “Edit” access of master data from everyone in the organization except the new master data maintenance (MDM) team. By eliminating these touch points, it forces requests to go through the MDM group for review and approval. Finally, the client will implement SupplyForms^™ so that users can submit requests for review and approval instead of making data changes directly in the ERP system that may or may not be necessary.

SupplyForms^™ Features & Functionality

SupplyForms^™ provides a secure, easy to use interface allowing resources across an organization to submit the following master data requests:

• Single item adds, changes, inactivations, reactivations
• Large volume item adds
• Purchasing vendor adds, changes, inactivations, consolidations
• Remittance vendor adds, changes, inactivations, consolidations
• Contract adds, changes, inactivations
• Manufacturer adds, changes, inactivations

SupplyForms^™ enables pain free request submission and processing by:

• Providing a flexible submission workflow hierarchy framework that supports as many approval levels as the client needs
• Allowing the client to limit the type of requests a user can submit
• Connecting directly to the materials management database so users can populate request forms with accurate data (vendors, UOM, commodity codes, etc.)
• Providing a powerful catalog number search feature that compares a cleansed version of the search string entered to cleansed versions of both the manufacturer and vendor catalog numbers stored in the database. This reduces the number of new item requests and creation of duplicate items.
• Allowing submitting users to choose the request submission hierarchy so the right people are reviewing the right requests
• Allowing approvers to edit requests instead of forcing them to decline back to the submitter for changes
• Providing optional logic where certain approved master data can be written directly to the materials management database, reducing data entry errors
• Creating delimited flat files containing approved "New Items" that can be easily imported into the materials management database
• Providing a simple to use "Search" tool that allows users to search for requests using any of 10 different parameters
• Providing an optional connection to a contract management application that allows users to search for "on contract" items and then import the associated meta data into the form for submission