Updated Measuring Effective Relationships Tool

SMI Announces Updated Measuring Effective Relationships Tool

Scituate, MA (December 16, 2010): The Strategic Marketplace Initiative (SMI) has released a new version (v3.0) of its popular Measuring Effective Relationships Tool (MER), a relationship management and improvement tool. Available for download at no charge on the SMI website www.smisupplychain.com, this easy-to-use software tool has been developed by SMI members for collaborative use among trading partners within the healthcare marketplace to measure the effectiveness of their business relationships beyond the traditional pricing and contract compliance topics.

The new MER V3.0 features a variety of user-friendly improvements allowing users to more easily and accurately measure their trading relationships by:

Involving a large number of stakeholders in the measurement processes
Utilizing automatic data uploading technology to eliminate rekeying
Developing and documenting action plan progress
Monitoring the performance of trading partners across over 50 different relationship elements

Developed and used by many SMI members, proper use of the MER Tool V3.0 will promote improved and more open communication among trading partners while increasing accountability and the ability to periodically document the status of key strategic business relationship elements. The tool is built on a Microsoft Access^© platform.

For information on SMI visit their website at www.smisupplychain.com.

SMI is a not-for-profit organization uniting providers and suppliers in shaping an improved, more efficient healthcare supply chain. SMI convenes seasoned executives from the various segments of the healthcare supply chain to work collaboratively to develop beneficial solutions to healthcare supply chain issues. All work is done for the benefit of the entire industry and as such, all solutions created within SMI initiative teams are made available to the public at no cost via the SMI website under “Resources”. Members include transactional trading partners from integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and academic medical centers; manufacturers of medical surgical, diagnostic and pharmaceutical supplies; capital equipment and medical device companies; distributors; service providers; IT companies; and other key suppliers.