Ramsay Health Care getting the benefits of using GS1 standards implementation. Part 1. The basis
Ramsay Health Care was established by Paul Ramsay, in Sydney, Australia, in 1964 and has grown to become a global hospital group operating more than 220 hospitals and day surgery facilities across Australia, France, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Malaysia. It is one of the top five private hospital operators in the world.
NEED: Ramsay Health Care wanted to improve the efficiency of their supply chain processes while leveraging Australian national e-procurement recommendations.
SOLUTION: The group has deployed a full suite of GS1 standards for identifying, capturing and sharing information to support interaction with their suppliers, including GS1 EDI.
BENEFITS: Thanks to GS1 standards, Ramsay has increased both the speed and the efficiency of their purchasing processes, underpinned the efficient operation of their hospitals and helped ensure the continuous delivery of quality healthcare. Procure to pay processing costs have been decreased by approximately 95% per document.
Guided by the Australian eHealth initiative Like many organisations in the healthcare sector in Australia, Ramsay Health Care supports the objectives defined within the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) supply chain program. Launched in 2005 with the goal to ensure a safe, secure and efficient health system that will deliver better health outcomes for all Australians, NEHTA recommends the use of GS1 standards, specifically:
- GS1 Global Trade Item Numbers® (GTINs®) for the unique identification of products
- GS1 Global Location Numbers (GLNs) for uniquely identifying facility and internal locations
- GS1 Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN®) as the foundation of the Australian National Product Catalogue (NPC) GS1 XML as the standard language used for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) purchasing processes
Every Ramsay facility – and every storage location within those facilities – has now been assigned a GS1 GLN. Suppliers undertaking EDI have also sourced themselves GLNs. Products in Ramsay’s SAP systems are synchronised with supplier data from the Australian National Product Catalogue (NPC), sourcing data for each product against each GTIN assigned to all relevant packaging levels. Business messages are exchanged with suppliers using GS1 EDI XML standards containing GTIN and GLN as the primary identifiers for products and locations.
To learn more about implementing GS1 EDI standards and become a CEDIAP® (Certified EDI Academy Professional), please visit our course schedule page.