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Why is this important? See our Value Statement for an Integrated Health and Supply Chain.
- Ability Capability for FR to include all facilities that can hold stock (warehouses, not just service delivery points)
- Ability Capability for FR to capture multiple hierarchies, such as geographic and government administrative hierarchies that can differ from programmatic supervision hierarchies and differ from supply lines.
- Ability Capability for FR to capture supply lines. By Supply Lines, we mean that product X comes to district warehouse Y from regional warehouse Z, for example.
- Capability for FR to include facility-within-a-facility relationships. For example, a regional hospital facility might include a maternity ward facility as well as an attached regional warehouse. Medicines might be tracked and inventoried at those locations separately, and stock movements might be recorded from one to another (from the warehouse to the maternity ward).
- Facility-within-a-facility relationships could be modeled as parent-child or tree data structures. Alternatively, this could be modeled as arbitrary, non-hierarchical relationships (eg, Facility A is 'co-located' with Facility B.)
- Capability for FR to include a GLN (GS1 Global Location Number) with any facility.
Note: Adoption of GLNs is not a short-term endeavor with immediate value. It's a longer-term proposition with later benefits. Use of GLNs will come as a result of barcoding products and barcoding shipments. It may be more useful for the supplier or 3PL (third-party logistics provider) more than for the health facility itself. It also may be part of ASNs (Advanced Shipment Notices) and other advanced GS1 practices. Overall, product barcoding is a more immediate need with higher benefits compared to location/GLN barcoding.
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