Drive Medical

Reduce Bed Inventory With Standardization

Forecasting the need for hospital beds can be one of the most difficult parts of managing inventory. The space requirement on a shelf for beds is significant, especially for DMEs that operate in tight retail locations. Even with fast fulfillment by manufacturers, you still run the risk of not being able to service a patient if you don’t have the right bed in stock. Every business is different and must optimize its own mix of inventory to stay competitive. Let us help you understand all of the factors that you might consider when choosing a bed.

Be Ready For High or Low

When a referral source requests a low bed for added safety, a full electric bed can be lowered to meet the needs of that patient but a semi-electric bed cannot. Does that mean facilities need to stock both high and low semi-electric beds? No. Most beds sold today have interchangeable headboards and footboards. As long as you have the right boards in stock, you can always swap them on whatever bed you happen to have. That is, of course, if all of your boards are compatible with your frames.

The Game Changer – Universal Frames

Not all beds can claim to be truly universal. What good are those extra headboards and footboards if they don’t attach to the bed you have? Look for a bed with a universal frame, meaning that all of your headboards and footboards will attach. The Drive Delta Bed series offers the only beds on the market that can utilize your old, obsolete bed ends. It even works with any generation of Drive bed as well as those of Invacare, Medline, and GF. This puts your entire bed inventory back into play.

Be Wary of Shelf Space Requirements

Are you working in limited inventory space and finding it difficult to pack various bed boxes into a shelf efficiently? No problem. Just put one of those five component boxes on another shelf, right? That works great until your service technician gets to the location and wonders where the missing box is. Using less boxes avoids this situation.

The other benefit of using fewer boxes is that they were packaged with space in mind. Multiple boxes may be great sometimes, but they can cause havoc in a warehouse. We often see situations where we can put 6 Drive beds on a shelf that formerly only held 2 of our competitor’s beds. If inventory space is one of your main problems, take the shelving challenge. Let us show you how we might substitute a different bed to make you more efficient ... and more profitable.