ISM - Charlotte had an incredibly successful start to the 2017 - 2018 year! Bill Armstrong, Director of Materials Resource Management Operations for Carolinas Center, Levine Children's Hospital and Carolinas Medical Center-Mercy and Alisa Dent, Assistant Vice President for Patient Care Srevices at Levine Children's Hospital explained how asking the right "what if" questions profoundly changed the way a process was carried out to benefit the Nurses at Levine Children's Hospital and the patients in their care. Nursing Services was responsible for managing all patient supplies for the Nursing Unit and were either handled with exchange cart systems or supplies were delivered to the Nursing Unit Central Storage Supply Room. When the RN performed these duties, it took them away from direct patient care. Materials Resource Operations worked with the nursing staff to develop a system whereby these duties were performed by a Materials Resource Emplyee. Supplies would be delivered to the bedside versus the Supply Room, and all ordering , par levels, and supply inventory would be managed by them. The nursing staff was freed up to perform to the highest level of their license!
Don't miss our next dinner meeting! November 9 - Registration is now open!
It’s not every day you get to capture and store megawatts of power, but for the employees at the Parker Hannifin Energy Grid Tie Division that is all in a day’s work. On Friday, November 4th, twenty people got to experience the future of the energy industry and take a tour of the plant.General Manager Jim Hoelscher started out by sharing how Parker Hannifin started out nearly 100 years ago in 1918 as the Parker Appliance Company and grew into the global industry leader it is today, making over $12.7 billion in sales.He pointed out how his company’s greatest strengths, its innovation that made it an early player in the industry and its passion for quality customer service, has set it apart from the competitors.
His division makes equipment that houses and monitors grid tie batteries utilizing a battery management system (BMS). This grouping of lithium ion batteries has the dual purpose of being able to keep a power grid at a safe frequency of 60 hertz throughout the day’s flux of energy needs and stores that energy in case of emergencies.One of the challenges their supply chain team faces is finding multiple manufacturers for the many specialized parts that help create some of the 875,000 products Parker Hannifin makes.
At the end of the plant tour, Falcon Fastening Solutions gave a demonstration of their Actylus Smart Bin System inventory control solution. The weighted bins have a sensor at the bottom that sends a signal to the cloud when the items in the bin get too low.The sensors are customizable to optimize when the notification is sent out, the data from Falcon can also generate customized reports, and it can interconnect to an ERP system.The impressive demo showed how time and money can be saved through its efficiency.
