A world of solutions
In our connected age, it makes sense to share ideas beyond national borders. That’s why the Blood Service has joined an international project coordinated through the Alliance of Blood Operators (ABO) with a plan to develop a greater understanding of how blood sector partners operate and enable long-term opportunities to collaborate and share ideas on how to improve our operations and, ultimately, better serve our customers.
The Supply Chain Optimisation Project (SCOPE) will focus on sharing specific project information amongst a group of international blood service peers so we can work together on addressing common pain points and look for opportunities for improvement across our entire supply chain, from donor recruitment to customer supply. The project team includes representatives from the Canadian Blood Services, American Red Cross, NHS Blood and Transplant (English blood service), Blood Systems Inc. (a not-for-profit US blood service), and Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
“Being able to talk to international counterparts is fantastic,” said Shane Winzar, the Blood Service’s Technology Transformation Manager, who is co-leading the project. “It’s comforting to know that everyone is dealing with the same issues!”
“We’re already starting to identify opportunities for sharing workloads and developing solutions together, implementing common resolutions, and ‘importing’ easily transferable processes.
In some cases, Australia may have the best process, but in others, another blood service has already done the hard work in finding a solution to a common problem that we might be able to adopt. That’s the value in a project like this.”
For example, our forecasting of blood usage in Australia is world class, but there are areas around technology interfaces with donors, staff and customers that we can definitely improve.”
The first phase of the SCOPE project will be finalised and the results reported at the Sydney meeting of the ABO Chief Executives in November 2016. We look forward to bringing you sneak peeks of the resulting new ideas and developments in 2017 and beyond.