21 Oct 11

The evolution of order processing: Part 1 Sharing the Workload

Speed is essential in the medical supply industry. Critical drugs and equipment must be delivered as quickly as possible to patients.  It is not unusual for medical device and pharmaceutical companies to receive as many as 1000 faxed, emailed or spreadsheet orders a day which need to be printed, sorted and forwarded to the appropriate Customer Services Representative (CSR).  The CSR rekeys the information into the ERP system – at this point the order can begin to be filled – but getting to this point can take an hour or more, and dealing with such a large quantity of loose documentation will inevitably result in missing paperwork.

In their busiest periods companies often hire additional staff to help with order entry.  This speeds up processing but exacerbates another common problem – human error.  For a global company with many sales offices, that’s potentially a lot of people miskeying a lot of orders. 

Fierce competition in cautious markets means healthcare suppliers can no longer swallow the millions spent rectifying the mis-shipments that result from data that has been processed incorrectly.  The smart ones are reviewing working practice, automating order capture and realigning resources by releasing staff from this tedious, repetitive work. 

The shared service centre (SSC) is one solution – a single department that processes orders from a wide geography.  The SSC aims to standardize, reduce administration costs and improve service. However, the SSC requires investment and cultural and process adjustment on a large scale, and that burden can outweigh the benefits.  The SSC has proved disappointing to some companies expecting to make significant savings.  A recent survey reports just 38% of 250 shared service implementations achieved the desired cost saving of 20%.

Without the right technology automating the process, applying the rules and providing transparency over the whole order to cash cycle, the SSC becomes an expensive sledgehammer that still fails to crack the nut.

The evolution of order processing: Part 2 Misadventures in technology – coming soon.