Air Liquide Healthcare
Customer Profile
Air Liquide Healthcare (ALH), a subsidiary of Air Liquide, is the world's largest supplier of industrial, medical, and specialty gases. Their global network encompasses 550 production plants, seven research facilities, and 28,000 employees.
The company's expertise and skills support customers with exacting requirements for medical machinery and consumables. ALH home oxygen services are designed to ensure optimal education and safety. Each service is backed by a home-delivery network made for the specialized needs of medical equipment.
Situation
Field representatives for ALH are on the road all day, everyday. To make their processes more efficient — and to ensure continued leadership in accurate and reliable service — ALH needed a flexible solution that gave field representatives closer interaction with corporate computer systems.
In addition, ALH was in need of a real-time inventory solution. The company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Microsoft Dynamics GP, was unable to control the flow of stock from multiple warehouses to the technician vans. And, because of the nature of the products, each van was loaded with products that may not be used on a service call.
As a medial supply company, any solution implemented by ALH must meet stringent statutory and regulatory compliance standards.
Solution
ALH teamed up with Spectrax to integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with the Spectrax™ System business software tools. The combined software offers field representatives a more streamlined system for sales and order processing, including the ability to scan bar codes, separate customer inventory lists, and utilize Microsoft MapPoint for directions.
The Spectrax System needed to be able to handle a large volume of data, since millions of field-service records needed to be available to employees.
The initial deployment, which took place in Australia, was viewed as a pilot program. The company plans to implement the solution globally through eight countries and to more than 1200 users. This expansion called for a scaleable mobility solution with flexible source code to enable future integration with various ERP systems.
Benefits
The ability for field representatives to access data when they're on the go has increased the reporting accuracy of ALH, helping the company meet statutory and regulatory compliance standards.
Bar-code-enabled mobile computers from Symbol Technologies increased the accuracy of stock transfers and reduced stock loss by 50 percent. Drivers are more accurate when transferring stock to their vans and in the use of the consumables. Plus, the data accuracy gained by logging serial numbers has reduced errors from 15 percent to below 1 percent.
The company estimates it will experience a complete return on investment (ROI) within 6 months of full implementation.