Bridging the silos of supply chain information systems through a holistic maturity model
Just as physical commodities flow a through supply chain, supply chain information systems (SCIS) enable the flow of commodity data—that is, the data needed to ensure that medicines move from the manufacturer to national warehouses to health facilities and, finally, to patients. Weak information systems hinder effective response to stockouts, expiries and other supply chain exceptions, as well as the efficient procurement and distribution of health commodities to patients.
With changing patterns of commodity flows and growing demand for more accurate information, global health supply chains have become more complex. It is essential that information systems—the backbone of today’s supply chains—are able to manage this growing complexity.
A holistic approach to improving supply chain information systems
Traditional approaches to improving SCIS have often taken a narrow scope. Improvements could focus on one health area such as HIV or on a specific operational component such as warehousing. A holistic approach, on the other hand, enables informed decision-making by government, donors, and implementing partners to improve overall supply chain information systems functionalities in a coordinated way.
The USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project has developed one such approach, the Supply Chain Information System Maturity Model (SCISMM), to help countries analyze their current supply chain systems holistically and plan their investments in supply chain information systems.
While the SCISMM has been developed in the context of public health supply chains, it was designed with core supply chain principles in mind, including the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model and the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) Framework.
With the maturity model, SCIS capabilities such as planning, order management, and warehouse management, as well as foundational capabilities like data management, have been categorized across five maturity levels. Each level defines the extent and maturity of system capabilities. The model also provides pre-requisites for each maturity level and an ability to develop baselines and measure improvements as systems mature.
The Maturity Model in Practice
SCISMM can be used to assess the strengths and weaknesses of SCIS that countries use. Based on the assessment, recommendations for improvement will be defined based on a country’s goals, priorities, and constraints. These recommendations can be used to develop implementation roadmaps, which feed into annual national strategic plans to ensure planned initiatives receive adequate investments. These roadmaps help steer investment into the most needed areas, critical for the often resource-constrained public health sector.
Here’s some examples of the maturity model in practice:
In Pakistan, the SCISMM was used to identify how deeply certain capabilities had been deployed to determine which features needed further implementation support and where new capabilities needed to be developed. Similarly, in Nepal, the maturity model was used to evaluate gaps between ongoing and planned supply chain systems and processes. The model was then used to develop a tailored plan for prioritizing future information system capabilities.
In Rwanda, GHSC-PSM facilitated a SCISMM assessment for the Ministry of Health to analyze the current state of the country’s national SCIS. The assessment identified important gaps, including lack of standardized product master data management. Based on this 2019 assessment, the Rwandan government chose to prioritize foundational system capabilities such as master data management and analytics and approved implementation of a national product catalog (NPC) for health product master data management.
“The SCIS maturity model was very useful in shaping results of the assessment of public health supply chain information systems in Rwanda”
Vincent Sabagirirwa, USAID GHSC-PSM MIS Advisor
An Improved SCISMM
The SCISMM is a guiding tool to aid governments, donors and implementing partners as they plan future SCIS investments to enhance the functionality of supply chain operations. The model can be used to evaluate current capabilities or develop tailored roadmaps for implementing SCIS, as in the case of its application in Pakistan, Nepal, and Rwanda.
Throughout 2020, GHSC-PSM continued to revise USAID’s SCISMM based on these country assessment experiences, and other countries’ use cases. The revised version of the SCISMM was developed in collaboration with the members of the Maturity Model-Small Working Group, a sub-group of the Digital Health and Interoperability Working Group. GHSC-PSM collaborated with the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina under the Digital Square project to review other HIS maturity models such as HIS Stages of Continuous Improvement and HIS Interoperability Maturity Toolkits and to align SCISMM appropriately. Based these collaborative improvements, SCISMM version 2.0 was published by USAID GHSC-PSM in March 2021 and is available here. For further details on SCISMM, please read this blog on the GHSC-PSM’s website.