Using Asana in healthcare: How Medzakupki Ukraine optimized its work processes

Asana’s impact on the enterprise: 

• 80 of 90 employees use the project tool; 
• Analytics collection time is reduced from 1 day to 1 hour;
• 4 departments in the enterprise are working simultaneously in Asana on procurement processes. 

State Enterprise “Medical Procurement of Ukraine” is the only national agency that provides centralized purchasing of quality medicines and medical devices at the expense of the state budget. The company was established on October 25, 2018 and is now under the management of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. It is a large enterprise with an asset value at the end of 2020 of more than 2 billion hryvnias, which is responsible for providing necessary medicines in the health care institution. 

The key objective of Medical Procurement of Ukraine is to form a transparent, efficient, competitive and economic system for taxpayers who are the ones who pay for the procurement of certain medical product’s.

Over time, there were more and more projects and tasks and the team lacked a workflow management platform to work effectively. While MedData helped with the analytical part of the work the progress of the project work was not captured in any way. That’s why the IT team began looking at options for acquiring a task management and optimization tool and eventually discovered Asana.

From memorizing tasks in one’s head to effective management

Having chosen a project-based approach to work, the company was faced with the problem of a lack of effective management. Tasks were recorded in Google Docs, notebooks, or simply memorized in the heads of employees. Therefore, it was problematic to track work performance and see the full picture of the project.

All the data on actual projects were scattered in different places and the management process was not centralized. There was also no way to examine the entire work process and learn about project progress. This negatively impacted the company’s productivity and efficiency as a whole. It was also important for the company’s departments to have access to each other’s tasks. Departments such as logistics, category management, purchasing and contracting needed to be synchronized. However, the main reason for the need for a management tool was the lack of ability to monitor work in one place. 

Therefore, the company’s IT specialists were tasked with analyzing the existing project management platforms on the market. 

The tool was evaluated on how it met the company’s requirements. The main selection criteria were: 

• Flexibility in use. It was important for different departments of the company to have access to each other’s tasks. 90 employees could not see each other’s work and moved blindly through their tasks. Now it’s possible to keep abreast of what’s going on in neighboring departments, which has had a significant impact on productivity;
• Ability to communicate with other systems via APIs. The enterprise is still growing and expanding, which means that the number of systems in use will continue to increase;
• The ability to generate reporting and analytics on the work done. 2,000 hospitals across the country are entering data on remaining medications and vaccines into the system on a daily basis. Collecting daily analytics is necessary to understand the scope of work. 

Well-coordinated work of all departments

As a result, the team selected some management tool vendors, got consulted and prioritized several of them. Among them was Cloudfresh, whose services the company ended up using. 

The company chose the task management tool Asana, after which a trial month of using the platform began. At the end of the trial period, it was decided to continue using the platform, since Asana flexibly adjusted to the internal needs of the company, namely: 

• Procurement and contracting; 
• Recruiting; 
• Marketing;
• IT development, etc. 

Another major benefit that Asana provided was the ability to be in touch with the work of all departments of the company. Since the different departments of a company often have common tasks, it was important to find a tool that would allow you to be aware of all the progress of the work and be able to see the whole picture of what is going on. In this way, the company also has the ability to plan tasks for the future and monitor the results of work at the enterprise-wide level online. 

Asana has improved in the following sectors: 

• The speed of preparing analytics on procurement tracking. Previously, it took a day for a company to compile all the analytics. Now with Asana it can be done in just one click.
• Quality and accuracy of the IT department tasks management and ability to use Scrum methodology for IT development management; 
• Promptness in gathering all the necessary materials to train new team members;
• Understanding of task milestones while interdependent with other departments.

As a result, 80 out of 90 employees are now using Asana on a regular basis. Asana is currently not used only by accounting departments, simply because of the routine nature of their work. 

Asana tool for transparent purchasing

Every year the State Enterprise “Medical Procurement of Ukraine” develops its own procurement, logistics and software capabilities. The company’s goal is to maintain this trend and in the near future to expand functionality and increase personnel. Thanks to Cloudfresh services, the company was able to cover almost all the needs that required a task management tool. 

Now the company has plans to scale Asana to further implement the tool into new departments on future projects. The company also plans to apply such features as task and project timelines, dynamic reporting management and interaction with Telegram bots via API. 

“Transparent procurement always means transparent processes and  Asana is one of those tools that helps us with it”.

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