Seven years ago The Cleveland Clinic turned to Herman Miller’s Certified Network member, Workplace Resource—Cleveland (now consolidated with APG Office Furnishings—Cleveland), for help organizing and better managing excess furniture and assets for use in facility projects.

“Regulations, procedures, and technology change rapidly in the healthcare industry, and we find ourselves renovating spaces frequently,” says Brian Smith, administrative director of Construction Management for The Cleveland Clinic.

“We standardized on Herman Miller furniture to make reconfigurations easier. We coordinated fabrics and finishes so we could use these products in any of our locations. But there were inefficiencies in our inventory system that resulted in wasting a lot of money.”

Workplace Resource implemented Herman Miller’s proprietary Asset and Inventory Management (AIM) system to help track and manage all the excess furniture and assets that had accumulated as a result of opening, closing, and reconfiguring the more than 20 hospitals and health centers that make up The Cleveland Clinic’s Ohio healthcare system.

The Cleveland Clinic’s financial team calculates that, over the last five years, they have saved more than $1 million through redeploying currently owned assets rather than purchasing new. Some of the inventory still being used throughout the campus is almost 20 years old.

According to Smith, “Prior to AIM, our project managers had to physically track their own inventory. Plus, we often purchased new products that duplicated what we had in inventory, because we didn’t know what we actually had or what condition it was in. Now with the web-based AIM system, our project managers can view the entire inventory online, reserve product for upcoming projects, and deploy inventoried assets before any new product is purchased. Even our design and architecture firms have access to the system so they can plan spaces around available product. It’s not unusual to do an entire project with reused furniture.

“More and more people in our organization are becoming aware of the AIM system and its capabilities,” says Smith, “not just project managers, but administrators of our clinical divisions, too. So when a reconfiguration is necessary to support changing procedures or accommodate new technology, we can often accomplish the project at a low cost and in a relatively short period of time. And that translates into improved patient care.”

Because the AIM system worked so well tracking furniture assets, it was expanded to also track stored medical equipment.

“The Cleveland Clinic used to store excess furniture in a variety of locations. Recently, all of the inventory was consolidated into a centralized location – a dedicated 35,000-square-foot space that holds anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 pieces of furniture at a time,” says Steve Crumpler, who oversees the clinic’s AIM program on behalf of Workplace Resources.

“In the past, items were often discarded rather than stored if they didn’t meet the clinic’s immediate needs. At other times, excess items were stored and unused for long periods of time, because they were being reserved for projects well into the future. Both resulted in unnecessary costs.

“As furniture assets were loaded into the AIM system,” explains Crumpler, “they were evaluated to determine which to dispose of and which to store. Many items not needed were donated to medical facilities in third-world countries. This reduced the inventory to only those items that could be redeployed, saving considerable money in warehouse space.”

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