Home Delivery Medical Equipment: Case Study
Home medical equipment delivery is a fast-growing area of the medical industry. Here we look at why that is and a specific case study of how to do it right.
Homecare medical
Homecare Medical is a family-owned healthcare business, employing 100 staff across Ireland. They supply quality products and services to the healthcare market. As part of their service, they supply critical products directly to people's homes right across the country. In this case study, we discuss how our Delivery Route Planner helped them to bring efficiencies their home-delivery service.
What we will take a look at in this case study:
The Challenge
When Homecare Medical approached us, they had been awarded a contract for distributing specific healthcare products directly to people's homes throughout the country.
They have years of experience and expertise the distribution of products on a wholesale basis and home-delivery services, they wanted to bring further efficiencies and cost savings in the management of routes for drivers.
The key challenge would be to successfully plan routes and ensure successful delivery in a time efficient manner.
The Solution
Having identified the specific challenges and goals of the project, we set about working with Homecare Medical to help them optimize their services by working more efficiently.
We quickly had all logistics and admin staff trained on our intuitive Desktop Route Planner, and all drivers onboarded with the Mobile Driver apps.
The ability to set separate start and end locations for routes on a driver-by-driver basis also meant that drivers could return home directly after a route, knowing in advance what time they could expect to finish their working day.
When it comes to medical products, it is critical that they are delivered to customers promptly and that they can be updated about any delays.
In this regard, SmartRoutes' in-built GPS live vehicle tracking was important to the Customer Support staff. By assigning "Helpdesk" (read-only) logins to the CS team, they had oversight of vehicle locations, and access to up-to-the-minute ETA’s, and were able to provide clarity and peace-of-mind to customers.
As with any nationwide delivery operation, there are always challenges. At SmartRoutes, we know that no two days in a home-delivery service are the same. That’s why we work closely with all our customers to ensure success. In the initial weeks and months of this project, we worked closely to tailor certain solutions to the needs of Homecare Medical to streamline processes and make the most of all features.
The Outcome
From the initial contact with SmartRoutes, all of Homecare Medical's Admin, Support & Driving Staff were onboarded and using the Desktop Route Planner & Driver Mobile Apps in less than a week. Getting up and running quickly is critical in any change management situation and the simple and intuitive experience was a great win for the implementation team.
By maximizing vehicle capacities, driver hours are significantly reduced resulting in greater work-life balance and happier safer drivers. Driver hours being reduced also decreased the companies CO2 emissions helping the company to achieve its greening targets.
Customer Satisfaction and peace of mind is driven by accurate ETA's and prompt responses to queries & updates on deliveries. The management team were able to learn from the insights they got from SmartRoutes and were able to deliver a hugely improved experience for their customers including a live vehicle tracking portal for customers so they knew exactly when equipment and installation teams were arriving to their home.
The Results
To read more case studies you can check them out on our Customer Stories page. If you would like to know more about our services, you can book a demo with a member of our team for a personalized walkthrough of the platform.
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Michael Santry
