McKesson

Case study

McKesson delivers critical documents in record time with DocOrigin®

INDUSTRY

Healthcare

Simple, yet reliable and highly automated single point of control for assured, accurate and speedy healthcare document delivery.

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SITUATION/CHALLENGE

The company’s continuous and rapid expansion of distributed medical products and provided services led to high labor costs, long document preparation and distribution time, and accuracy issues. The new solution had to modernize the production environment, reduce document processing time and costs and ensure regulatory compliance while replacing legacy systems.

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SOLUTION

DocOrigin improved reliability and optimized document production speed, accuracy, logic and automated multichannel delivery of documents in formats including pdf, html, fax, e-mail and printing.

BENEFITS

DocOrigin provided significant savings in software licensing plus additional cuts in document management and maintenance costs by about 50% in relation to the closest alternative proposition. A total return on investments was achieved in less than 18 months.

McKesson Medical-Surgical, a division of McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 5th on the FORTUNE 500, is a global healthcare services and information technology company, dedicated to offer medical supplies, healthcare solutions, distribution services and clinical resources.

With our previous software we sometimes experienced a slowdown that could impact our shipments to customers. Re-platforming our critical print processes was an essential change.”

DON FAUTH
Vice President, Application Development
McKesson Medical-Surgical

The Medical-Surgical unit of McKesson works with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson Medical-Surgical helps its customers to improve their financial, operational, and clinical performance with medical-surgical supply management, healthcare, business and clinical services.

From bandages to exam tables, the company’s catalog includes more than 180,000 national brand products along with their own line of high-quality products. The industry’s continuous and rapid expansion of products, services and solutions create an ever-growing number of offerings for McKesson to distribute and a constant increase in demand.

Meeting these everyday challenges and preparing themselves for tomorrow’s tasks, is one of the prime focuses of the company. This strategy allows McKesson to help their customers, that includes more than 200,000 drug stores, retail chains and healthcare facilities, to operate their businesses with the highest possible quality, safety and efficiency.

INITIAL SITUATION

The Medical-Surgical business unit utilized the Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system for more than a decade.

As a global market player, the company guarantees next-day delivery for its orders, which adds additional pressure for accuracy and efficiency. The company needed additional functionality in their ERP, SCM, WMS, logistics, financial and other business systems, a professional document design, generation and delivery system, which would improve reliability and performance of document-related interactive and production processes.

The original document generation solutions replaced with DocOrigin were Adobe Central Pro, FormScape, and PDF Wizard.

Over the years, these obsolete and un-supported systems started to seriously affect their distribution system. These obsolete document and forms solutions were slowing down ERP systems at peak times, which led to high labor costs, slower shipping during high demands and accuracy issues. At this point, McKesson started to look for a replacement.

THE REQUIREMENTS

Over the years, McKesson had implemented a multitude of business and medical information systems on a variety of computing platforms. The new document generation and delivery system needed to be compatible with all of them, like Enterprise Resource Planning, Warehouse and Logistics systems without changes to existing business systems. This meant the new solution needed to dynamically process multiple data formats and present and deliver documents via omni-channel in real time.

The new solution was required to automate the creation, sorting and bundling of shipping documents and packaging to speed up the medical product delivery to customers. In addition, this solution should be flexible enough to create and deliver any form, document or label template, like purchase orders, reports, product documentation, product labels, acknowledgments, invoices, statements, picking and packing slips, and more, with a convenient preview capability, and make it easy and fast to customize existing document templates without IT involvement.

Based on the level of production volume and complexity, McKesson Medical-Surgical searched for a fast solution with an industry proven reliability and performance. The solution had to handle the existing complicated data flow from all business systems, and demonstrate it was flexible enough to meet the future modernization of healthcare and ever growing distribution demands.

The Solution

McKesson initiated an extensive market search on enterprise forms and customer communications software. After evaluating several product options, the company chose DocOrigin. This solution offered a simple, yet reliable and highly automated single point of control for assured, accurate and speedy healthcare document delivery.

  • TRANSPARENT MIGRATION TO A SINGLE POINT OF CONTROL

    DocOrigin comes with an out of the box automated conversion tool for legacy document templates. This feature made the migration from Adobe Central Pro, FormScape, and PDF Wizard to DocOrigin fast, transparent, easy and secure. After a short training, the McKesson team was able to migrate their old templates using DocOrigin, thereby reducing the service charges by tens of thousands of US Dollars and empowering the company to create and edit templates in-house to respond to changes in a speedy manner. The new system also supported multichannel document delivery, including the following channels: PDF, PDF/UA, adaptive HTML PCL, ZPL. FAX e-mail and printing.

  • IMPROVING ACCURACY AND COMPLIANCE RISK

    Another benefit of the new system was the ability to manage all document templates from one single point, which also assured that the latest approved template versions are used in all locations and for all shipments of the Medical-Surgical business unit. This significantly reduced compliance risks, minimized human error rates and facilitated brand integrity throughout the entire production stages.

  • FAST & AUTOMATED DOCUMENT DELIVERY

    DocOrigin improved the generation of high volume document processes by over 80%. The same processes took several hours with the their legacy software solution. DocOrigin’s validated integration with Oracle’s EnterpriseOne has proven performance and reliability in healthcare, distribution and logistics. The solution brought document related business process to a new level for McKesson. Now producing more than 200,000 shipping documents per hour, DocOrigin supports real time automated shipping and private labeling of products, from multiple business systems. At McKesson, DocOrigin runs at the speed of business!

Future Opportunities

Confident from the success of DocOrigin in the Medical-Surgical unit, McKesson intends to implement this document generation and delivery solution in other business units. The company sees information technology and process automation as important assets, which will help employees meet the challenge of the ever increasing information demands in a continuously and rapidly rising variety of distributed medical products and associated services. The company’s slogan in the modernization process is “work smarter, instead of harder”. This strategy allows the company to offer a high quality customer service now and in the future, by delivering medical and surgical products and services to the right customer, at the right time, and in the right way.

At a Glance

  • Transparent migration of document templates from multiple legacy systems to one modern Oracle validated integration with Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
  • Reduced template maintenance time by approximately 50% through using intelligent template design and smart logic
  • Created a single point of document template management to ensure accuracy and regulatory compliance in all distribution locations
  • Improved performance of document generation processes by using a modern solution with an installation on a separate server, that does not slow down the business systems at peak times
  • Ensured Integration Without Modification™ with McKesson’s business and medical information systems, i.e. no change orders to the existing business software
  • Improved document design and brand integrity in all medical and surgical related document types, such as shipping documents, reports, invoices, bills, labels, picking and packing slips, statements, reports and more

The McKesson business unit needed a next-generation solution to replace our current print program,” said Don Fauth, Vice President, Application Development at McKesson Medical-Surgical. McKesson needed a more modern and efficient solution. “We process large volumes of print, especially at peak times,” explained Fauth. “We have just completed migrating the last of our larger reports over to DocOrigin. We are experiencing greatly reduced processing times. What used to take many hours for our previous processes is now taking less than 30 minutes.”

DON FAUTH
Vice President, Application Development
McKesson Medical-Surgical

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