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Consignment stock you own, in hospitals you cannot count

Regulated distribution is a paperwork business with a warehouse attached. The device is the easy part. The import permit, the registration certificate, the serial number, the expiry and the cabinet in a hospital storeroom decide whether you get paid.

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What the day actually looks like

  • A shipment sits at the port because one registration certificate expired and the renewal is with a colleague on leave.

  • The theatre used three implants last night. You find out when a nurse sends a photograph of the peel-off labels.

  • A reagent box travels in a cool box with a data logger nobody downloads until a customer complains about a result.

  • Tender pricing lives in a spreadsheet with sixty lines, and the version the salesman quoted from was two revisions old.

  • A service engineer calibrates an analyser and writes the readings on a form that stays in the van until Thursday.

Where it usually breaks

  1. Serial numbers captured too late

    Devices arrive with serials and UDI codes on every carton, and the warehouse records them at despatch, if at all. So the field inventory is a list of quantities. When a manufacturer issues a field safety notice against a serial range, you cannot say which hospital holds those units, or whether they were implanted.

  2. Consignment stock counted annually

    You own stock sitting in twenty hospital storerooms and you count it once a year, badly, with a clipboard and a nurse who is busy. Between counts the figure is an estimate. Usage is invoiced when somebody remembers to send a form, and short-dated units expire in a cupboard you paid for.

  3. Registrations tracked by memory

    Product registrations, agency letters, import permits and free sale certificates each have an expiry date, and each sits in a folder on a shared drive. Nobody is alerted before they lapse. The first warning is a shipment held at customs, or a bid rejected on a document you could have renewed in March.

  4. Cold chain proved after the fact

    Temperature-controlled lines travel with a logger, and the logger is read only when there is a complaint. So an excursion in transit is discovered by a laboratory getting a strange result, weeks later, on a lot you have already sold out of. The evidence you needed was in a device in a drawer.

  5. Tender prices nobody controls

    Each hospital group has its own agreed price list, its own contract period and its own penalty for late delivery. None of it is in the system, so the salesman quotes from a copy, the invoice goes out at list, and the credit note is issued three months later, after the customer has withheld payment.

How the work runs

  1. Capture at goods-in

    Serials, lots, UDI and expiry are recorded when the pallet is received, not when it leaves. That is one scan per carton by the storekeeper who is already opening it, and it is the single change that makes every regulatory obligation downstream cheap instead of impossible.

  2. Own the consignment locations

    Every hospital cupboard becomes a real stock location in your system, owned by you and visible from the office. The representative scans what was used on the ward, which converts consumption into an invoice the same day and puts expiry dates for that cabinet on somebody’s screen.

  3. Diarise every licence

    Registrations, permits, agency agreements and certificates become records with owners, expiry dates and attached documents. Renewal activities are raised months ahead, escalate if ignored, and block a quotation for a product whose registration has lapsed. The regulatory file stops being one person’s private knowledge.

  4. Close the cold chain

    Logger data is attached to the delivery when it is received, and an excursion raises a quality check against the specific lot before that lot can be released for sale. Quarantine is a location with a lock on it, not a note on a shelf that a busy picker will read past.

  5. Price by contract

    Tender and framework prices are loaded as customer-specific price lists with start and end dates, so the quotation, the delivery note and the invoice all draw the same figure. Where a contract carries delivery penalties or minimum volumes, those terms sit on the record and report against actual performance.

What changes once it holds

  • A safety notice resolves to named hospitals and named serials.
  • Consignment usage is invoiced in days, not at year end.
  • No licence expires without three warnings and a named owner.
  • A temperature excursion quarantines the lot before anyone sells it.
  • Quotations, deliveries and invoices carry the contracted tender price.
  • Service and calibration history is attached to the serial number.

Traceability here is a legal instrument

In regulated distribution the record is not management information. It is the thing you produce when a manufacturer issues a recall, when a ministry inspects, or when a device is implicated in a patient outcome. That changes the design. Fields that would be optional anywhere else become mandatory and blocking. Corrections leave an audit trail instead of overwriting. Deletion is available to nobody. And the person entering the data has to be able to do it in a warehouse, quickly, or they will find a way around it and the record will be worse than none at all. We design for the inspection first and the convenience second.

Consignment is your inventory, on their premises

Most distributors treat hospital consignment as a sales problem. It is an inventory problem with a sales consequence. The units are your asset, they sit on your balance sheet, they expire on your account, and they are in a building you do not control. Until each cupboard is a location with its own quantities, lots and expiry dates, nothing about that exposure can be managed: you cannot rotate short-dated stock between sites, you cannot chase unbilled usage, and you cannot tell a finance director why the write-off happened again. The representative’s phone is the instrument that closes it.

Service history belongs to the serial

Analysers, monitors and surgical instruments create a second business behind the sale: installation, preventive maintenance, calibration, spare parts and warranty. Almost everyone runs it on a separate spreadsheet keyed by customer name rather than by serial. So when a unit moves between two hospitals in the same group, its history stays with the old customer and the next engineer arrives blind. Attach every visit, reading, part and certificate to the serial number itself. The unit then carries its own file wherever it goes, warranty claims can be evidenced, and a contract renewal can be priced from what the machine actually cost to keep running.

Questions we get asked

Do we have to scan every serial number at goods-in?
For anything implantable or serialised by the manufacturer, yes. For low-value consumables, lot and expiry are usually enough. We set the tracking level per product family rather than applying one rule to the whole catalogue, because forcing serial capture on a box of gloves teaches the warehouse to work around the system, and that habit spreads to the items that matter.
How do we count consignment stock without annoying the hospital?
You do not count it. The representative scans the used labels on a normal visit, which takes minutes and gives the ward staff something they want: automatic replenishment. A physical verification then happens on a rota, cupboard by cupboard, rather than as one exhausting annual exercise. Hospitals generally welcome it, because short-dated stock leaving their shelf is their problem too.
Can the system stop us quoting an unregistered product?
Yes. A product whose registration has lapsed, or which was never registered in that market, can be blocked from quotation, sales order and delivery for that country. We usually make it a hard block with a documented exception path through the regulatory manager, because the alternative is discovering the problem at customs with a customer waiting.
Our tender prices change per hospital and per year. Is that manageable?
It is ordinary price list work, once somebody agrees to own it. Each contract becomes a dated price list attached to that customer, loaded from the award document, with the previous version kept for audit. The difficulty is never technical. It is that nobody currently owns the moment a new award replaces an old one, so both stay in use at once.
What happens to twenty years of service records?
We migrate what can be matched to a serial number and archive the rest as attached documents, searchable without pretending to be structured. Inventing structure that was never captured produces a clean-looking database full of guesses. You get an honest cut-off date: everything after it is queryable, everything before it is findable, and nobody is misled about which is which.

What this industry usually needs

Tell us what is not working

Send one line about what is going wrong. On the first call we will tell you whether it is a system problem, a process problem or a governance problem — and which one to fix first. That call is free and it is not a sales meeting.

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