Good evening everybody, and welcome to tonight's webinar. My name is Amelia Sherwood and I'm the key account manager here at the webinar bets. I'd like to welcome you to this evening's session.

Am I doing this right? Strategies for managing inventory Effectively, which has been kindly sponsored by the veterinary Management Group. If you have any questions for our speaker during the session, then please pop them in the Q&A box, and provided we have time, then we will run through them at the end.

We're very pleased to welcome Nicole Clawson as our speaker tonight. Nicole has over 14 years of experience in the veterinary industry, with 10 years in small animal practise. She worked her way up from receptionist to operations manager in various clinics and understands the internal workings of a successful practise.

She now is a founder and consultant at Veterinary Care Logistics, a consulting firm specialising in inventory management for veterinary professionals. Since its inception, Nicole and Veterinary Care Logistics have helped hundreds of veterinary practises from coast to coast to create sustainable, lasting inventory management strategies in their veterinary practises. Nicole is also the founder of the Veterinary Inventory Strategy Network, a community and educational platform dedicated to inventory management, the host of Inventory National podcast, the founder of Inventory Alley, and the first ever inventory management software for vets, and a regular speaker on inventory management.

So Nicole, over to you. Thank you so much for having me. I truly appreciate it.

So, today's presentation, we're gonna talk about some strategies for managing inventory effectively in your practise. And so, I am from the United States, and so you might refer to this as stock control or another measure. But essentially, we're talking about how do we manage the pharmaceuticals, the hospital supplies, things like that in our practise, so that we can truly allow our patient care to thrive.

So, in this workshop, we're gonna look at what does success look like when it comes to managing inventory. Then we are going to chat about how to troubleshoot your inventory if something isn't going right. Then we're gonna follow that up with talking about some key performance indicators to monitor and measure the success for your inventory.

So just a quick little story about how I got started in veterinary medicine and managing inventory. So, fairly long ways a while ago, my first job managing inventory, I was told to, when you shake a bottle and it feels low, you order it. And that's really the only training that I got.

And so I remember looking at the walls of the pharmacy shelves and thinking, What does low even mean? How do I do this? And then, the gal who trained me left the practise two days later.

So, needless to say, it was quite the challenge when I first got started. And so since then, I've really, it's been my passion to help other practises, so I feel much more comfortable managing their inventory. So if you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out anytime.

You can also find me on most other social media channels, and you can even find me on Pinterest. I have a lot of pharmacy and design organisation, things there. So, before we kind of get started, think about how are you feeling about your inventory.

So when we think about inventory control or stock control, we think about these things because having an inventory strategy really impacts the profitability of your practise. So typically, your stock can be the 2nd largest expense in your practise. I know that's true for the states.

I'm not sure about in the UK. So it can be the 2nd largest expense. But not only that, if we don't have the things on hand to treat our patients, really, that's when patient care can start to become a challenge.

And also, it can be really frustrating for our teams because they can't find what they need, it's running out of stock, etc. So developing these inventory strategies can not only help the profitability of your practise, but can also help with patient care and making sure that our team isn't as frustrated. So, before we kind of get started with what does success look like, let's talk about some red flags that you might, you know, be experiencing that kind of signal that you need to look at your inventory further.

So let's say that if you are running out of things a lot, so maybe you find that it seems like consistently something is always running out. So if you're noticing that, that is a really good indicator that, you know, you, there's some room for improvement there. If you notice that products are expiring a lot, so if you have a lot of expired things, if you're going to reach for products and something is usually expiring, Maybe that you haven't updated your inventory costs or prices in a while.

So, for example, you know, right now, there's a lot of cost increases that are happening with our products and our supplies. So, you know, thinking back to, and thinking about when is the last time that we increased our prices, or at least reviewed our pricing strategy to see if it was still in line, or with the rising costs, do our prices need to be adjusted. So another thing is, is if you've had a lot of team or doctor changes.

So if you have had doctors join the practise or leave the practise, you might be experiencing kind of a shift in your inventory because you're either maybe using less or using more than you once were. So another red flag, if you will, is if you haven't counted in a long time. So I remember, you know, during my first inventory job, that nothing in the practise had been counted in over 9 years.

So really, it was so hard to tell what was on the shelf, what wasn't on the shelf, And so it took a while to get the practise management system and our software system to kind of match what was on the shelf. And that is helpful because then we can start to track our inventory. We can see if we are having a lot of mischarges, or even if we have a theft problem.

So kind of understanding what we have on the shelf can help us, can help allow us to make better decisions about our stock management. So another red flag that you might see is that if people are always asking where something is or if it's on order. So if people are having a lot of challenges finding things in your central storage or your storage supplies, that might be an indication that there might be some room for improvement there.

OK. And also, if you're experiencing these things, there is no judgement, especially for me. I know that there is sometimes not a lot of training and resources about how to manage your inventory in the stock in your practise, effectively.

And so if this is feeling like you, that is OK, because you're here to learn, and so that's the first step, right? OK. So if you are running out of things a lot, let's kind of look at that deeper.

So if you are running out of things, it might be time to evaluate how you are reordering and demand forecasting. So before we get started, what does demand forecasting mean? So, essentially, demand forecasting is using our previous purchases to predict what we're going to use in the future.

So for example, let's take holiday baking, for example. So let's say that you wanted to, you know, bake a bunch of different recipes, so rather than, you know, kind of reviewing them, you just go to the store, you don't really look at the recipes, you just kind of get what you think you need. But then when you're kind of like halfway through trying to make a batch of cookies, you realise that you ran out of eggs.

It's very similar in our inventory. So with holiday baking, generally, we would look over the recipes, we would write down anything that we need, we would write down the quantities that we need. And so it's very similar when it comes to our inventory.

We want to look at what we have previously sold or consumed. To help kind of predict what we'll use in the future. And so using terms like reorder points, so the a reorder point is the point at which you would reorder something.

So it basically becomes a quantifiable piece of data essentially that says, OK, when I have 2 boxes of syringes on the shelf, I'm gonna order 4 boxes. And so using these reorder points can really help us to determine when something is low and when it needs to be reordered. So then, once we've kind of quantified what low means, and we understand when and what needs to be ordered, we can set up flags.

So whether that be, you know, physical flags, like reordered cards, like, in the picture here, or in many practise management softwares, you can set up reorder points. So as soon as something is flagged low, it prompts you to reorder it. So when we kind of set up these flags in our inventory, it can help us to keep from running out because it'll flag us when we're low.

And so, I highly recommend using reorder points and, you know, thinking about how much you are using or selling of a particular product, when creating these. So, for example, you know, if you are running out a lot of things or you find that you have a, you know, that it's challenging to keep things in stock, you can certainly use reorder tags. And the nice thing about this is, is you could use them for anything.

You could use them for Pins or paper for the printer. You can use them for toner cartridges for the printer. You can also use them for paper towels, syringes, needles, pharmaceuticals, really anything in your inventory to serve as a flag that something is low.

Do you have any questions on reorder tags or using reorder points in your inventory? Let me know in the chat if you do. It is absolutely one of my favourite things to use and it really can help kind of serve as the foundation for your, you know, stock management strategy.

Because rather think Thinking, oh, we keep 5 bottles on the shelf because that's what we normally do. Now we start thinking about it in terms of, oh, I know that I'm gonna use 3 bottles in the next 2 weeks. That's my prediction.

So now I'm gonna use that prediction to help kind of inform what I'm going to use later on. OK, so if your products are expiring, it might be time to evaluate a couple of things. So, if you're noticing that you have a lot of expired products, the first would be, you know, to put in a tracking system for tracking your expiration dates, so that you know when things are coming up on expiring.

So sometimes you can use your practise management system for this. I also like to use like colour sticker dots, and so you can put a colour sticker dot on each item. And so let's say if it expires in 2022, it would be a red dot.

If it expires in 2023, it would be a yellow dot, and it expires in 2024, it would be a green dot. And then you can write the month that it expires in the dot. So then when you're looking at your pharmacy, you can visualise and see everything that is going to expire soon.

So that can be a helpful kind of way for tracking your expiration dates. But then it's also important to kind of take it one step further, to look at the potential root cause. So, when we have a lot of products expiring, we want to think.

About how much do we currently have on the shelf right now? How are you determining how much to order? So let's say that if you had 5 bottles of something expire, that probably means that you might have over-purchased to begin with.

And so we can think back to reorder points, right? To kind of predict what we'll use in our, in the future. And so if we're finding that we're running out of things a lot of times, or we have a lot of products expiring, we can kind of go back and recalculate these reorder points.

So I also recommend setting a standard operating procedure or a written process for expired or soon to expire products, so that, you know, somebody is going on around on a regular basis to determine if something is expired or is going to expire soon. OK, so now we've kind of talked about what are kind of some red flags in your inventory that maybe your strategy needs to be reviewed. So now let's talk about what does success look like?

So success is relative, of course, and it can vary depending on your role and your goals. So, for example, success for you might look like your key performance indicators are in line with what's recommended. Success might look like you have what you need in stock, so that you can provide your patients with the best care possible.

Maybe it is you don't feel like you're barely treading water and you're not super overwhelmed. Maybe it's that you can focus on your personal development or practise growth. Maybe it's that you don't feel a sense of chaos or reactivity throughout the day.

You know, you're trying to see patients or you're trying to, you know, do other things in your practise, and you're like, oh my gosh, we ran out of this, or we're about to run out of this, or we're about to run out of this, right? So we kind of want to kind of calm that chaos, if you will. And then, finally, success might look like things are rarely expiring, and you have what I like to call an inventory system ecosystem.

So that's where your ordering processes, your demand forecasting processes, your pricing processes, all those are working together so that your stock management is a well-oiled machine. OK. So, when something is going wrong with your stock management, or you're like, oh, we are running out a lot or something else is happening, there are a couple things that we can do to troubleshoot to kind of determine what is going wrong, so that ultimately, we can fix it.

So, the first step to figuring out what's wrong is to examine what I like to call the root cause and not just treat the symptoms. So, if you kind of think about, you know, our patient care and caring for our patients, right, when somebody comes in, or, I guess when a patient comes in, You know, we are evaluating that patient. We're doing diagnostics.

We want to really get to the bottom of the diagnosis before we start treating the symptoms. So, for example, if a dog came in and they were coughing, we want to really kind of understand, is it because they have a tumour on their lungs, or do they have pneumonia, or do they just have a, you know, upper respiratory infection? And so, because if we treated for an upper respiratory infection, but it turns out that they had a tumour on their lungs, that solution would not help them.

And so it's the same in our inventory. We really want to kind of examine the symptoms to find the diagnosis or the root cause of the problem, so that we can apply the appropriate solution. So the first step in this is to perform what I like to call a root cause analysis.

So first of all, what is a root cause analysis? So it's a process for identifying the root cause of problems or events, and an approach to responding to them. So this is really based upon the idea that effective management requires more than just putting out fires that problems for problems that develop, but actually finding ways to prevent them.

So, there are several different methods for completing a root cause analysis, but I'll kind of share with you my favourite. So this method is called the 5 wise. So my nephew, very near and dear to my heart, he is 3 years old.

And when, anytime that I'm talking to him, he always asks why. He asks why probably 100 times until I completely don't know the answer. And so that's kind of what we're doing here.

So, when you, you have kind of a problem statement, and then you ask why 3 to 5 times to kind of to determine the root cause. So, let's look at an example. Let's just say that your car gets a flat tyre on the way to work.

So the first, we're gonna ask why. So why did you get a flat tyre? Because you ran over nails in your garage.

So then you ask why were there nails on the garage floor? And it's because the box of nails on the shelf was wet, the box fell apart, and the nails fell from the box onto the floor. So then we ask why again to see why was the box of nails wet.

And it was because there was a leak in the roof and it rained really hard last night. So our ultimate root cause for why we got a flat tyre on the way to work is because we have a leak in our roof. And so if we had stopped at just sweeping up the nails on the floor, we and kind of solve the problem by just sweeping them up, we would have missed the root cause or the leak in the roof entirely.

And so that's why using the five Ys can be just a really helpful process to kind of get to the bottom of a problem. So, let's kind of look at an example maybe in your pharmacy. So, let's say that a a client came in and a patient got sent home with the wrong prescription.

And so we kind of start by asking why did this happen? And so let's say that you had a prescription double check in your in in your pharmacy. So that anytime a prescription goes out the door with the patient, it is double checked to make sure that it's accurate, etc.

But this time, the prescription double check did not happen. So then we ask why, and there was no one around to double count prescriptions. And we can say why again.

And because no one was around, because everyone was at lunch. We ask why again, and it was people can just go to lunch whenever. So, ultimately, the root cause and solution was that people can go to lunch whenever, so there's really no system to ensure that two people are in the treatment area at one time.

So the solution would be to assign and stagger lunches. So you can kind of see here, right? We start with a problem.

A patient got the wrong dose in their prescription, and we kind of ended up with the root cause and the solution. So this means that we can really try to, you know, apply an effective solution to the problems that we're experiencing. So another example of this might be, let's say that, that a patient accidentally got sent home with prednisolone rather than prednisone.

And so we can ask why that happened. And so maybe we can say, oh, the pharmacy area was really distracting and so it was kind of hard to focus. Or maybe the veterinarian's verbal orders for that particular medication weren't super clear.

Or maybe it was that the label, it wasn't clear, you know, on the label that it was prednisolone versus prednisone. So there's kind of, there, there can usually be multiple reasons why something might be going wrong. And so you can use the five Y's to get to the bottom of it and kind of understand the root cause.

And you can use this process in anything in your practise, right? So it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, just for stock management, it can really be for anything. OK, so now that we've kind of talked about you know, what success might look like in your inventory and how you can kind of use and troubleshoot when something doesn't quite go right.

So now let's shift gears and talk a little bit about key performance indicators. So, first of all, what is a key performance indicator? So, a KPI or a key performance indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effective a practise is in achieving a particular goal.

So there are a lot of different key performance indicators that can be measured, but it's most important to monitor what's valuable information to your practise. So just a quick note. So KPIs are generally quantifiable information, they're not subjective, right?

So this is kind of like 22% rather than good versus bad. So I kind of like to think about key performance indicators as lab work for your inventory or your practise. So with KPIs, they are Measurable values, and they typically have a reference range.

And so if our key performance indicators are outside of the particular reference range, we know that something is impacting the health of our practise. And so that's kind of how we can use our KPIs to understand what might be happening. OK, so here are kind of some popular KPIs that you might see.

So, some include total revenue, revenue per veterinarian, your average transaction charge, new clients per month, right? So if we're kind of monitoring our new clients per month, that lets us know how many, you know, how we're growing, how our marketing strategies are working, etc. Then we have our active clients, right?

So in this, maybe it's that our active client base is growing, but what if our active client base was shrinking? So if our active client base is shrinking, that's really helpful information to know so that we can respond and react to it. So then you might also have total visits or appointments per veterinarian, expense category breakdown, so kind of looking at your expenses, your facilities, your, labour costs, your inventory costs or cost of goods sold, etc.

So those are kind of some popular KPIs. But, key performance indicators, it's important to, you know, think about that these are more than just a measurement. So they really provide concise information about the health of your practise, but what's even more important is what we do with this information and how we can kind of respond or react to it.

So our key performance indicators are truly helpful or meaningful if they inspire action. So they can help determine if a course correction needs to be made, or if an investigation needs to be launched. So, for example, if a key performance indicator is high or low in comparison to your benchmark or your reference range, how will you know?

What corrective action steps or actions will need to be taken to kind of correct the key performance indicator? Who will be in charge of improvements and following through. So, for example, let's use our, you know, new clients, for example.

So if your new clients start to, you know, The number of new clients starts to go down fairly drastically, how will you change that? How will you look at your marketing strategies or maybe other policies in your practise to see what you need to do to kind of increase the number of new clients per month again. So these are kind of some questions that might be helpful when identifying and reviewing your key performance indicators.

So what is your desired outcome? Why does this outcome matter? How are you going to measure your progress?

How can you influence the outcome? Who is responsible for the outcome? And then how will you know when you've achieved your outcome.

So these are kind of just a lot of questions that we can think about when we're, you know, kind of establishing what KPIs that we want to track. I know that with VMG, typically, there is a lot of benchmarks and reporting that goes along with kind of your VMG. I don't know if membership is the right word, but so KPIs can be very, you know, used pretty commonly.

So these questions can really help you take these benchmarks in these reference ranges to the next level to help your practise really inspire action. So let's look at some of my favourite key performance indicators for your inventory. So, the first one is your cost of goods sold, and typically this is represented as a cost of goods sold as a percentage of your revenue.

So, before we get started, what is actually included in your cost of goods sold? So it's typically an umbrella term for the various costs related to caring for our patients and our inventory items. So this is a very helpful metric because it lets you know at a glance, it helps you to identify how much you're spending on your inventory or patient care costs.

It also helps to identify if there are any room for improvements and cost savings. And I find it's incredibly helpful to regular regular. Regularly review, to monitor any trends.

So let's say, for example, if you're looking at your cost of goods sold each and every month, you can start to see maybe you're trending upward and your inventory costs are starting to increase, or maybe the opposite is true where your cost of goods are going down. So that's why it kind of helpful to regularly monitor them on a regular cadence, so we can kind of see any patterns or trends that might be happening for this particular metric. So in the states, the generally accepted benchmark is 20% cost of goods sold as a percentage of your revenue.

But even this in the states will vary depending on the practise type, right? So if you're a general practise and you only see companion animals, your cost of goods sold will look very differently than a large animal veterinarian who only sees cattle and equine. It'll also look very differently from a specialty or emergency or urgent care practise.

So when we're thinking about, you know, our cost of goods benchmark, it's really helpful to make sure that we're looking and comparing apples to apples, not apples to octopus. So, That's just kind of a just helpful thing for when you're looking at benchmarks. So kind of a cost of goods sold then are often an arbitrary number that's kind of randomly decided by a hospital, but it doesn't take into account the unique hospital's product or service mix, their demographics, or a number of other factors.

So, for example, your product or service mix, if you do a lot of product sales and you generate a lot of revenue from, you know, selling pharmaceuticals, etc. You are naturally gonna have a higher cost of goods than somebody who does very minimal pharmacy sales. So it's just kind of important when you're looking at this key performance indicator to kind of take your unique practise into consideration.

So, and I always think about the cost of goods is about replenishing the inventory that you've consumed in a just in time format that helps to sustain future revenue creation. So let's say if you wanted to reduce your inventory costs, we simply just want, wouldn't want to spend less, because then if we're spending less, the possibility that we might be running out of something might increase. And if we run out of something, then we can't treat our patients, and then that revenue creation is not sustained.

So we want to look at a lot of other factors before just simply spending less. OK. So the next key performance indicator that I like to look at in your inventory is called inventory turnover.

So inventory turnover is a measure of the number of times your inventory is sold or used in a time period. So typically this we look at this over a year. So measuring inventory turnover is so essential because it really is the most significant indicator of your inventory or stock efficiency.

It measures how well you're generating revenue from your inventory. So, for example, when we look at turnover, we can say, oh, this product turns 4 times a year. So that means it is sitting on the shelf for about 90 days before it's ever sold.

And so because it's sitting on the shelf for 90 days, we've already paid for it, that money has gone out the door, but we haven't generated any income from it. And so having inventory sit on the shelf for a long period of time can really tie up cash in our inventory and, just create some challenges there. So when we're thinking about our inventory strategy, remember, we are talking about Our reorder points and kind of using demand forecasting earlier.

But this is kind of where it comes in, where we can see, OK, I am sitting on these products for just way too long before they're ever sold. So I know that I should re-evaluate these. Or maybe the opposite is true.

Maybe you're using it so quickly that you're having to repurchase that that item a couple. Times a week. And so then you're spending so much of your time trying to keep that particular item on the shelf.

So our inventory turnover really lets us quantify, you know, if it is sitting on the shelf for too long. So, generally speaking, your inventory should match your billing cycle. So if you, you know, on statement billing and the payment terms is every 30 days, you can think that we generally want to, keep 30 days' worth of stock on hand, or we want to turn our inventory over.

Once per month. Because the whole kind of goal and idea is that we want to use or sell that inventory before we ever have to pay for it. And we certainly don't want to kind of sit on that inventory or have it on the shelf for a long period of time.

OK. So the next key performance indicator, I'm not sure if like, technically this is a KPI, but this is just something that I truly like to monitor because this monitoring the value of inventory on hand is incredibly beneficial to see if you have just way too much stock on hand. So if this number is high, this lets you know that, oh, you have a lot of inventory on the shelf.

And so in the states, kind of the general industry benchmark is you want to have $12 to $18,000 of stock on hand per full-time equivalent veterinarian. So, for example, if you had two full-time equivalent veterinarians, you would want to have between 24 and $36,000 on hand. But let's say if you are calculating this number and you find that you have over $50,000 on the shelf of inventory.

So this means that your stock, you probably have too much of it on hand, which probably means your inventory turnover is fairly low, which means your cost of goods might be high. So with these kind of key performance indicators, they all work together and in conjunction with each other to see how the health of our inventory is. And they also kind of help to inform one another.

So if our cost of goods are really high, we could look to see what our inventory turnover is. Are we sitting On the shelf or, you know, are these products sitting on the shelf for way too long and it's starting to impact our profitability? Or maybe that we have too much overstock and we just have a lot of stock sitting on the shelf, and so that's increasing our cost of goods.

And so that's kind of why they can work together to help give you a clear picture. And so typically you can use your practise management system for this information. So you can kind of see.

You know, what the value of inventory is on hand. And I typically like to monitor this monthly as well. So in addition to your cost of goods, I also monitor the value of inventory on hand.

And so the formula for this is fairly easy. So it is the value of your inventory on hand, divided by the number of full-time equivalent veterinarians. OK.

And so the next one, this is also not necessarily a technical key performance indicator, but this is also a metric that I find to be incredibly beneficial in your inventory, and that is to monitor the value of a variances or adjustments made to your stock levels throughout the month. So this is helpful to watch because let's say if, for example, gabapentin, you normally kind of adjust maybe 50 tablets a month or something like that. So, but then all of a sudden, you start to really increase that and you're missing like 23, 400 capsules each and every month.

So by monitoring how much adjustments are being made, when you're cycle counting or when you're doing counting. It can be helpful to see, oh, I'm adjusting so much of my inventory, because if we're making those adjustments, typically that means that we're, it's kind of gone missing, and we're not generating any revenue from it. And so that's why this can be helpful to watch for, you know, significant increases or changes in the number of adjustments that you're making to your stock quantities each month.

So this is also helpful to see if maybe you need to mon audit medical records to see if you know, you're missing a lot of charges or if there's a lot of discounts that are happening. Or maybe it's a case that some members of your team aren't necessarily clear on how to charge for a particular thing. So that's why kind of monitoring how much we're adjusting can be helpful when looking at that.

So you can use your practise management system for this or an Excel if your practise management system doesn't have a report for this, but typically you can run a report to see how many adjustments you've made each month. And so this is really helpful to use with what's called cycle counting. So cycle counting is when you count small amounts of your inventory or stock frequently throughout the year.

So rather than, so in the states at least, we have to pay taxes on the value of inventory we have on hand at the end of the year. So one of the big end of the year processes is to count everything on the shelf to see what that value is. But if we use cycle counting throughout the year, that means we're keeping it accurate throughout the year.

So then at come the end of the year, it's not a huge process. Then, with also a cycle counts is we can, you know, watch and see if there are a significant number of adjustments made. So if, you know, all of a sudden we miss 300 capsules of gabapentin or 400 capsules of or tablets of tramadol, we can kind of Immediately figure out what happened and where that went.

Because let's say if we did not count all throughout the year, then all of a sudden at the end of the year, we need to adjust, you know, our gabapentin by 7000 capsules, let's just say. It's really kind of hard to figure out where that went and what could have happened. So I like to review the number of adjustments made each and every month.

So generally speaking for most key performance indicators, I kind of like to set time at the beginning of the month to review them for the previous month. OK, so before we move on, is there anyone that is watching that currently tracks key performance indicators? So let me know in the chat if you do, if you don't, or if you don't right now, but you would like to.

Let me know in the chat. OK. So now let's talk about delegating your inventory, because if you are a practise owner, or if you're a practise manager, hospital administrator, you probably have a lot of other duties, and tasks that you need to do that you might not have, you know, that you might need to delegate parts of, your inventory to somebody else.

So I like to really think about this four-step framework for delegating really any task in your inventory or your practise in general. So, the first thing that I like to do is really define the task. What am I asking this person to do?

And then it's just important that you're clear on that. So when you're explaining it to somebody else and kind of delegating that role, it's very clear. Then once I kind of have an idea of what task that I want to delegate, the next step is to determine who I actually want to delegate this to.

Is it somebody that has really great attention to detail, or maybe they're really interested in the operations or management of a practise, or maybe they would really excel at this particular task. Then I like to train the team member so that they are very clear from start to finish, exactly what the task is, what is expected of them, and if they need further help or resources, where they can go for that. Then, once the team member is completely trained, then I like to monitor, encourage, and evaluate.

So, I like to kind of touch base with them often, check their progress, see if they have questions, or if I can kind of help support them in that role or task, or whatever it is that they're doing. OK. So, let's say that you're a practise owner, your time is much better spent being the veterinarian and the CEO slash visionary of your business.

So, as if you're a practise owner, managing inventory certainly could be delegated to another team member. If you're a practise or maybe a hospital administrator or an inventory manager, there will likely be a time when you need to delegate as well. So think about what task could be delegated and what do you actually want to delegate.

So let's say if you're like, oh, I really like the idea of using reorder cards in my inventory, right? So, a little reorder cards here. So how these kind of work is when let's say for example, When you have one box on the shelf, you want to order another box of syringes.

So this would be rubber banded then to the last box, and then when somebody goes to pull off that box, they excuse me, when they go to open that box, they pull off the tag, stick in a bin, and they know to reorder it. But then, once this has actually been ordered, then it needs to be re put back on that that box of syringes when it arrives. And so you could delegate somebody putting these tags back on the items after they have arrived.

Maybe it's that you want to delegate unpacking boxes to somebody. So depending on what your role is, the level at which you delegate might be different. So, when we are delegating something, we always want to think about what does success look like for this role.

So if you are a practise owner and you're delegating inventory to another team member, some things you might want to look at, you know, how much time are they spending managing inventory? What do the key performance indicators look like? Are they maintaining appropriate stock levels, or do we have too much on the shelf?

Are we seeing a lot of stock outs or when we run out of something, and a lot of expired products? Do they start to become an advocate for, you know, stock? Because really managing inventory and stock management is truly a business within a business.

So you can kind of think about these different metrics to see how they are excelling in their role, or maybe if they need some further training and support. So it's just really important to kind of understand what success means and your expectations for the person completing it. Because if you or them aren't sure on their expectations, it's really hard for them to, you know, complete that to the best of their ability.

So let's kind of look at an example. So if we think about receiving or unpacking boxes, because I think that's probably one of the most delegated tasks. So this works best to have specific people dedicated to unpacking boxes, rather than just leaving it up to anyone in the practise that's available.

It's also helpful to put in a protocol or special system for refrigerated shipments. So that this is especially true in the summer, to ensure that any temperature controlled boxes are put away in appropriate time frame and they aren't ruined because they were left out. This role also typically works best for somebody who has good attention to detail and isn't an exam room technician on receiving days, because if they're constantly in and out of appointments, it's gonna be really hard for them to break away to be able to unpack those boxes.

So then thinking about, let's say that you did delegate somebody in your team to unpack boxes and receive items, what would be the measure of success? So the items might be put away correctly, if they were received into your practise management system correctly, no temperature controlled shipments were missed, and then proper controlled substance, . Or I'm not sure what they are called in the UK.

I apologise. . I, I apologise, but the controlled substances, things that we, you know, that are more regulated, you know, that those proper procedures are being followed.

So, in summary, your inventory project, who does it involve? If you want to involve other people, what would the role be in that? What specific tasks need can be completed?

Maybe you want to add in your reorder tags. Maybe you want to try to use your practise management system more, maybe you want to monitor some more key performance indicators. What of that can be delegated?

How can other members of your team help support you? And then how can it be measured, how the process be documented, and then set a goal and a deadline. So with that being said, are there any questions that I can help answer for you?

Thank you for that great presentation, Nicole. So as Nicole mentioned, we are going to open the floor for any questions that haven't been asked to be added to the Q and A box. So now is the time if you have any burning questions.

So, I mean, personally, I've certainly seen a shift in stock management over the past couple of years, factoring in how practises have adapted during the pandemic, so this was a really great topic and definitely food for thought, Nicole. I'm glad it was helpful. Yeah, I feel like that stock management really has changed, especially in the last couple of years, as we've kind of navigated the whole pandemic situation.

Yeah, I completely agree. So I think that's the end of our session tonight. So on behalf of all of us here at the webinar vet, I would like to thank our speaker Nicole, for a wonderful presentation.

And this session will be available on demand within the next 48 hours. And once again, a big thank you to the Veterinary Management Group for sponsoring the practise management programme. Good evening all.

Thanks so much for having me. Bye, bye.