Market Perspectives

The 15th annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute to improved organizational efficiency, productivity and performance. These leaders and pioneers have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Michael Prokopis at Steward Health Care its prestigious 2022 Digital Leadership Award in Operations and Supply Chain for using Alteryx to transform data processes to enhance supply chain operations. This award recognizes the individual, organization and vendor that best exemplifies leadership in the technologies that support operations or service and supply chain. All award finalists in the Operations and Supply Chain expertise area were considered for this prestigious award.

A new generation of innovative digital technology is now available to aid organizations in optimizing operations and the supply chain, aligning it to customer demand and the fulfillment of products and services. Utilizing advanced technologies can dramatically improve the value of products and services; failing to embrace them can decrease it. The effective application of analytics, collaboration, machine learning, planning and IoT increases the agility of the supply chain across sourcing, manufacturing, distribution and logistics to ensure full value is realized from the inventory of products.

Ventana Research selected Steward Health Care for the 15th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Operations and Supply Chain for its use of data to streamline processes through visibility into inventory and utilization. Steward Health Care System is the largest private, physician-led healthcare network in the United States. It operates 39 community hospitals across 10 states and serves over 2.2 million patients annually. In 2020, with COVID-19 surging throughout the world, hospitals were in dire need of personal protective equipment. Finding ways to quickly get protective equipment in the hands of medical professionals required visibility of data from hospitals around the country, compiled into a single report for better informed decision-making.

Steward Health Care used Alteryx to take several different data systems and wrangle them together to come up with reports, deliver insights and automate repetitive tasks that previously required significant staff time. Instead of having a dedicated analyst for each data source and communicating data across the organization, Alteryx delivered easy access so workers could conveniently analyze, manipulate and share it. Little training was required to use Alteryx, which sources data across multiple enterprise planning resource systems from various hospitals in the network. Data with different types of fields and information is unified into a single report.

Steward Health Care System and Michael Prokopis were selected as the 2022 Digital Leadership Award winner in Operations and Supply Chain for streamlining data processes and making them cleaner, more trustworthy and actionable. Steward can now operate across hospitals with a consolidated view of costs and ensure correct access to contract pricing. The ability to identify contract spend across hospitals and take appropriate action is essential to managing costs. Reports and data are streamlined through Alteryx Scheduler, and time-intensive reports run overnight so information is ready when workers need it. Most importantly, Steward has been able to identify improvements in patient care and experiences from this initiative.

Operations and supply chain presents an opportunity for organizations to go beyond transformation and work towards innovation. Alteryx addresses the challenges of organizations that need to facilitate pipelines of data and provide insight to business processes. Organizations looking to maximize the value of business and technology investments across people and processes should consider how operations and supply chain can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Alteryx can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Michael Prokopis at Steward Health Care, for your leadership.

Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance to those in operations and supply chain roles to help maximize the value of products and services through more effective planning and efficient operational execution. We provide education on best practices and assessment for adoption of applications. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and enable supply chain resilience and operational readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.