Medical distributor more than doubles anticipated ROI

Seneca Medical provides medical surgical product distribution and supply chain services to healthcare providers for DCs in Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia. After gradually rolling out voice-directed case picking workflows in its six DCs, the company has achieved 99.9% accuracy, 25% productivity improvement and $1 million in cost savings.

Prior to the voice deployment, the company used paper-based processes for piece-picking and bulk picking. On the piece-picking side, eaches are placed into totes bound for a hospital department. For bulk, pickers move cases to pallets bound for a hospital storeroom before the hospital distributes items internally.

Beginning in piece-picking, the company deployed voice solutions (Vocollect by Honeywell, vocollectvoice.com) and partnered with experts in voice-directed process optimization (Speech Interface Design, speech-interface.com) to develop a system it gradually phased into operations workflow by workflow.

Even with the greater variation common to bulk picking, the solution produced rapid returns there as well, according to Keith Price, vice president of information services for Seneca Medical. After successes in the first DC, Seneca introduced the technology to its remaining DCs.

“We aimed for only a 10% productivity increase to get a return on investment in about 10 months,” he says. “That was our justification, but right off the bat we started seeing a 15% productivity improvement in lines picked per hour, and some locations were up as much as 25%.”

Included in these figures is the savings from improved quality control. The facilities handle a number of items that look similar, but had enjoyed high accuracy rates for some time before voice thanks to veteran staff members and a double-checking process. In fact, accuracy improvements were not even factored into the planned ROI.

“Now we don’t double check anything anymore,” Price says. “Of 140,000 lines piece-picked in the largest warehouse, there are 10 to 15 errors per month, down from 30 to 40. If you follow the procedure, it’s really difficult to pick the wrong item.”

When considering potential incentive benefits for pickers, officers had targeted 55 lines per hour for piece picking and 35 or 40 on the bulk side. “Almost all our locations are hitting that, and some are as high as 90 to 100,” Price says. “Whereas back on paper the absolute fastest was 75 to 80.”