Silverado Senior Living’s Best of the Best winning PURSE program utilizes experts from major departments to create a more efficient and less costly purchasing process.
ALFA 2012 Best of the Best Winner
Silverado Senior Living communities and home care providers share a clear mission: to improve the lives of seniors with dementia. Now they have a more unified, well-thought-out supply chain to help them with the practical details.
Silverado’s various senior living communities used to act very independently of each other using multiple suppliers for each major product category. “We were very decentralized,” says Steve Taylor, senior director of purchasing.
Over the past two years, Silverado set about streamlining its supply chain to create more efficiencies and cost savings. While every company periodically scrutinizes its purchasing process and considers ways to rein in costs, Silverado took a very strategic approach. In an initiative called PURSE (which stands for PURchasing, Savings and Efficiencies), the purchasing department made the decision to lead from behind, thereby ensuring the products and systems they put into place would make sense in the context of providing the best care possible for residents.
A key component of the process was establishing teams of stakeholders—experts from all major departments—who help the purchasing department decide on the best products based on direct experience with residents. “Purchasing acts as the project leader and guides folks through purchases, but we are in no sense the final say, [as in] ‘This is the way we have to do things,’” says Taylor.
For example, the stakeholder team for medical supplies includes the director of clinical services, the vice president of nursing, and direct caregivers. The purchasing department serves as project leader and does the work of negotiating prices and contracts. If an employee comes across a product that he or she believes would better meet customers’ needs than the approved options, the team will review the recommendation.
“We consider formularies to be living documents,” says Taylor. Early collaboration across departments has been critical for ensuring buy in. “We are passionate about partnering with the operations team to bring into our communities the highest quality, best priced products to serve our residents,” says Dawn Usher, SVP, chief administrative officer.
The above best practice was recognized as an ALFA 2012 Best of
the Best Winner. Do you have a best practice, product, service or
solution at your community or company that is advancing excellence in
senior living? The Call for Nominations for the ALFA 2013 Best of the
Best Awards will begin in November. Visit ALFA.org/bestofthebest to read more best practices.
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