Client: American Medical Depot (AMD), a privately held full line distributor of medical/surgical products and services. AMD is a multi-million dollar distribution company with several warehouse locations servicing the entire country (US). It serves a large customer base comprised primarily of hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities including a number of Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) medical centers.

Challenge: American Medical Depot was essentially facing three major challenges in the operations and technology arena when they initially approached us. First, in trying to sustain a historically high rate of growth, AMD's transactional volumes were increasing sharply taxing and overburdening the existing infrastructure. Second, AMD's competitors (mostly large Fortune 50 companies) were using technology to raise the level of service in the market place leaving AMD faced with the challenge of providing faster turnaround times and improved quality of service to its customers. The third, and probably the biggest, was the need for AMD to leverage its technology investment into a long-term plan to drive backroom efficiencies. AMD needed solutions that could reduce its internal costs while enhancing the accuracy of transactional data being processed by its systems that could have immediate impact but also be scalable and offer long-term economies. In short, they needed to outsource their IT needs to someone that could take responsibility for the short, medium and long term integration of technology into their business.

Solution: American Medical Depot teamed up with APS Technologies. Working closely with the customer, APS created a true enterprise-wide business to business commerce solution. We understood their processes and systems and then created an integrated solution wherein the orders from their customers would go directly into their legacy system. No more phone calls, no more manual entry, nothing! This was a seamless solution that not only reduced their internal costs but also increased the accuracy of data while enhancing their monitoring capabilities.
It was not enough to recommend the installation of a commercially available off the shelf enterprise solution because AMD had built an entire business around the efficiency of their existing legacy system. It was important to understand the inter-relationship between the system and the workflow in the entire operational side of the business. To ensure an orderly transition, it was often necessary to build interim solutions to keep the business from suffering while the new system was being phased in.

Realizing the full value of technology: APS did not stop there! Now that we had a business understanding of the processes of our customer, we took a step further by creating data mining and OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) solutions. Such solutions allowed AMD to create various data views starting from 2-dimensional ad-hoc query reports to multi-dimensional OLAP cubes. The customer could now truly enjoy the benefits of an open database. They could view their sales trends (hence gearing up to focus on the weaker sales segments), they could analyze their inventory and the costs associated with them. In one instance AMD identified excess inventory within their supply chain overstocked in two of their warehouses! We loved it when we realized the value we are adding to our customer.

Results: Growth and recognition for our customer! American Medical Depot was awarded the US Navy's Liberty Bell Award by one of their customers for the extraordinary response time.