West Monroe Completes Successful Warehouse Management System Implementation

The system and related process changes will produce estimated cost savings of $600,000 annually, in accordance with a government mandate to decrease sourcing and distribution expenses.

West Monroe Partners, a full-service business and technology consultancy, and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) today announced that they have successfully completed the implementation of a warehouse management system that consolidates inventory in a centralized distribution center for CHUS’s two hospitals in Eastern Township.

West Monroe began working with the CHUS in 2008 to apply a LEAN-driven approach and identify potential sources of waste in the organization’s distribution operations, as well as to define the processes that will support a regional distribution model.  West Monroe also facilitated the implementation of Copilote, a software package designed specifically by Michel Savart for the healthcare sector and used in more than 150 hospitals in France, the United Kingdom, Dubai, and Canada.

“West Monroe Partners brought the healthcare industry experience and logistics knowledge necessary to improve our processes and integrate the Copilote solution effectively with our financial systems,” said François Larue, CHUS’s director of hospital logistics. “More importantly, the West Monroe team took the success of our initiative to heart and helped boost the performance of our hospital logistics services—a vital step to reaching our cost-reduction goals.”

"We found that implementation of Copilote together with a centralized distribution approach was an effective model for reducing supply costs," said Daniel Vendette, senior manager in West Monroe Partners’ Healthcare Supply Chain practice.  “The success of this first phase allows us to move forward with operationalizing our regional vision, as we have planned.”

The work completed at the CHUS is the first phase of a regional project. In the second phase, the warehouse management system implemented will serve additional CHUS institutions across the region.

About the CHUS

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke is composed of two institutions: the CHUS - Hospital Fleurimont and CHUS – Hospital Dieu. Its mission has four components: patient care, teaching, research and evaluation of technologies and methods of health intervention. As the fourth largest hospital group in Quebec, the CHUS stands out in several cutting edge specialties such as gamma knife radiosurgery, positron emission tomography (PET) scans, angiography and interventional neuro-oncology. Nearly 9,000 people are part of the CHUS hospital community (employees, doctors, researchers, teachers, students, interns and volunteers). For more information, visit www.chus.qc.ca.