The Impact of Supply Chain Transformation |10 in Alberta Health Services, Canada .
AHS Supply Chain Implementation Strategy Implementation of the supply chain strategy began with a decision in 2010 to accomplish a fully consolidated finance and procurement system infrastructure across the province. The consolidation of all of the regions into a single governance structure began with combining all the health organization governance boards (i.e., boards of directors) and creating a single corporate entity, Alberta Health Services, with a CEO reporting to a board of directors. The next major step was to create the system infrastructure required to support a province-wide governance for AHS. Hence, senior AHS leadership made the decision to implement a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This province-wide infrastructure project was an opportunity for the CPSM team to leverage the implementation of the ERP across the province, advancing the goals and objectives of the CPSM team’s supply chain strategy.
1. Implementation of ERP Infrastructure Across the Province The senior leadership of AHS engaged the CPSM team leaders to design the implementation strategy for the new ERP system within a period of 11 months. Standard practice for ERP implementation required a three-year time frame for effective stakeholder engagement to support adoption of changes to work flow and routines. The CPSM team considered whether it was possible to achieve this very aggressive target of consolidating all finance and procurement transactional processes in such a short time frame. The decision to proceed with implementation of the ERP system was made jointly by financial and CPSM teams, with the support of the Executive Leadership team. One key issue they recognized was the lack of timeline available for the full engagement of all stakeholders and clinical teams, which would normally be important for such a large and complex infrastructure initiative. The teams recognized the challenges, but felt the alternative—continuing to work without a province-wide ERP infrastructure—would limit their progress towards a fully integrated supply chain strategy to achieve the strategic goal of “one system” for the province. The fast-track timeline for the implementation required the team to develop a plan to ensure stakeholders would have the support they needed wherever possible, along with a risk mitigation strategy for managing the issues that would likely arise for system stakeholders. A budget of $26 million and a timeline of 11 months was approved by the CEO of AHS to proceed with implementation of the new ERP system: The reason for the 11-month timeline was they were expecting other system consolidation and implementation to be approved. Also, the other piece [was that the CEO] had actually thought this through pretty well; we needed to be able to demonstrate that we were actually merging [consolidating systems], and the best way to show that we’ve merged is to implement a financial system with a single charter of accounts, and put in