Z5 Inventory: Realizing Savings by Eliminating Product Expiration

Managing and monitoring vast amounts of inventory is a complex affair for all hospitals. Staying stocked with ordinary daily supplies like surgical gloves and gauze and budgeting for more critical products used in life-saving surgeries can get overwhelming day-to-day. The result is that often that supply chain professionals end up with a surplus of medical supplies. It is estimated that a typical hospital supply is overstocked by 15to 30percent to avoid the repercussions caused due to stockouts. As a result, vast amounts of expired medical and surgical supplies go directly to landfills every year in the U.S., and in doing so, hospitals lose over $5 billion annually. This is where Z5 Inventory, a healthcare inventory management platform, helps healthcare providers. The company has made its mission to save money for providers by optimizing their supply chain and eliminating product expiration. With a combination of services and an end-to-end inventory platform, the company enables providers to identify, move, sell, and donate their slow and excess inventory. “Our platform allows providers to identify what they have on hand and remove what they don’t need,” explains Carl Natenstedt, CEO of the company.

Z5 Inventory leverages its logistics capability to move the excess inventory to locations that are likely to use them. To do that, the company uses data analytics to find a suitable location and handles product shipping. “Our optimization process brings huge cost savings to hospitals and healthcare providers,” says Brandon Burris, CTO of the company. Z5 Inventory’s platform helps hospitals streamline the process of taking physical inventories, develop insightful analytics to help them identify savings opportunities, and suggests the best methods for realizing those savings. The company has a specifically designed solution, Z5 Reallocate, which is built on the Z5 inventory platform, which helps reallocate the excess inventory before it expires.

As the platform runs using a modern microservices architecture, it is auto-scalable. When activity surges, the platform scales up its resources to provide its services without affecting users. In addition, Z5 Inventory solves one of the longstanding problems in healthcare inventory management: the disparate nature of catalogs of inventory items. Within the platform, managers can successfully mitigate issues associated with inaccurate inventory data by modifying and reconciling product records. In addition, the platform improves item master data by comparing it against a Z5 Master Catalog, which acts as a single source of information on inventory items supplied by industry manufacturers.