IC11/PO13

We currently have IC11 and PO13 locked down to a team of 4; however, there is an executive push to grant access to add/change/delete items to our 11 buyers. What are your opinions of decentralizing access for the item master and vendor item?

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Infor Lawson Supply Chain Group - Discussion

Comments

jon-athey

I would not recommend it. Before Lawson we had McKesson's Matkon and when I first started this job every buyer had full access to the item master. It was a mess. Inconsistent naming conventions. Multiple UOMs for the same UOM (i.e. CASE, CS and CA). Multiple entries of the same item. I would say that it's best practice to have as few cooks in the kitchen as possible. One of the first things I did was take access down to one buyer and myself as a backup. I started the item master scrubbing project about a year before Lawson implementation started. I think we were fairly clean when we went live and I wanted to keep it that way. Today we have a dedicated position (we call the Item Master Master) for item master management (along with myself and one other for back up but only for the rare emergent instances an item needs to be changed and the IMM is out of the office). This position is part of our Contract Management team and takes ownership of the item master data for Lawson and Cerner Surginet. New items are brought through one of many Value Analysis Teams which the IMM attends and then Contracts goes through their process before handing them off to the IMM. Our turn-around time for item master adds is about 48 hours post VAT.

Stace Webley

I agree, don't do it. Even a strong policy wouldn't be bullet proof to duplication and UOM errors. The naming strategy is also very important, so maintaining standardization would be very difficult. The same is true from a vendor item perspective. You would probably also create more work for your contract maintenance person when doing price changes, vendor replacements, acquisitions, etc. due to possible duplication or wrong UOM pricing.

unknown

Absolutely not. The item master needs to stay centralized to as small a group as possible. Ours goes up a pyramid - any employee may request an item through a ticketing system which routes through the buyers, VAT, and Contracts. The approved items come to a group of three of us who maintain the data standards and load into Lawson.

Decentralizing it would put all our GPO tiers at risk as the leading cause for rejecting items at the moment is duplication (dashes, dots and spaces) or because it would pull out usage on a GPO Tier and cost the district more money than any preceived savings.

Decentralizing would obliterate any value analysis or clinical oversight.

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