St. John?s center serves 22,000-square-mile area

A logistics warehouse near the Interstate 44 and Glenstone interchange has shifted its focus from baseballs to cotton balls and other medical supplies.

St. John's Health System, which purchased the facility at 2009 Neergard from Rawlings, is continuing the building's distribution functions, but with a much different take, according to Mike McCurry, executive di-rector of logistics and operations for the Sisters of Mercy Health System, of which St. John's is an affiliate.

"There is a saying in logistics: boxes is boxes.' ... But we cannot separate ourselves from what's in those boxes in health care," McCurry said. Because of the raw necessity for the goods, he said, "No other supply system on earth is as complicated as health care."

To take care of patients from a medical equipment and supply standpoint, 437 stops covering 1,800 miles are made daily from the warehouse, called the St. John's Consolidated Services Center, McCurry said. Those deliveries include the entire St. John's Health System. From a logistics standpoint, that en-compasses about 22,000 square miles, six hospitals, 80 clinics and 12 ambulance services.

And last month, a daily truckload delivery to the St. John's Mercy hospital in St. Louis was added to the routes.

McCurry said about $80 million in goods passes through the center annually. The health care industry as a whole, McCurry added, spends about $1 billion per year with distributors.

The 89,000-square-foot Con-solidated Service Center does business with about 400 manufacturers of health care supplies, the largest of which is Abbott Laboratories, McCurry said.

Springfield is the geographic center of both St. John's Health System and the Mercy Health System, he said, making it very feasible to distribute goods from here.

"Logistics need central' to work. Springfield is now a huge operations hub" for Mercy, he said.

But it hasn't reached its full potential yet.

The service center usually holds about 3,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) on hand, he said, but it has room for about 20,000 units. "We expect a lot of growth in the future," McCurry said. "We are really just beginning."

The remaining space may eventually be used for the larger Mercy network that encompasses hospitals in Kansas, Okla-homa and Arkansas, according to Mike Peters, St. John's vice president of communications. "This would be an ideal location to service those other facilities," Peters said.

"Not only will we expand the SKUs because we take on more of Mercy, but because we take on a broader spectrum of the things we stock in order to have a higher fill rate for our customers," he said. "This warehouse is our safety valve so we don't run out."

McCurry said St. John's began operations in July 2001, after spending about $200,000 on renovating the facility.

He said that about 50 employees run the daily operations at the center and a new, two-story, 18,000-square-foot of-fice addition is being constructed. It is set to be finished by late summer.

Almost every item in a St. John's Health System facility excluding the very technically oriented items, such as those often used in orthopedics have come through the warehouse, McCurry said. The service center typically begins receiving shipments at 4 a.m. every day and wraps things up by about noon. The service center owns 16 trucks, McCurry added, and about 10 truckloads enter and exit the facility each day.

These operations have saved the health system about $400,000 a year, he said.

McCurry said he knows of only three other health care distribution facilities like this in the country.

"This building is not your typical warehouse," he said. "What we do is different. It's not just about stuff in boxes, it's about people."