How to Improve Pharma & Med Device Customer Service By Optimising the O2C Process

How to Improve Pharma & Med Device

Customer Service

Who Will Benefit Most from this Whitepaper?

Healthcare organisations, in particular medical device and pharmaceutical companies. Under increasing pressure to do more with less, they recognise that their order-to-cash processes are not fully optimised; and that customer-facing staff frequently must take on transaction-related tasks, sacrificing opportunities to enhance customer relationships.

Within these organisations:

GPOs • Heads of Customer Service • Heads of Supply Chain •Heads of Shared Service Centres •Heads of Finance • Heads of Logistics •

By Optimising the O2C Process

OmPrompt White Paper

2| OmPrompt - How to Improve Pharma & Med Device Customer Service By Optimising the O2C Process How to Improve Pharma & Med Device Customer Service By Optimising the O2C Process - OmPrompt | 3

Today’s Healthcare SupplierAll areas of the healthcare industry today are experiencing mounting pressure. Why? Competition is becoming more intense as customers seek products at the lowest price whilst requiring even higher levels of service from their suppliers. This situation is putting significant strain on suppliers’ margins and requiring them to consider strategies that will improve their processes to help them become more efficient and increase service performance.

• As healthcare suppliers work to penetrate their most valuable customer segments, they must align with their customers’ demands; either by leveraging a “least expensive” sales model or by reducing customer service and support levels in order to offer lower cost products.

• Category leaders have grown primarily through acquisition. This is intended to improve customer service by providing them with more complete offerings. However, as a result, they end up with many disparate, non-integrated systems. This often leaves them to plug the gaps manually – using people to manage the situation.

Suppliers are looking for practical ways to maximise the opportunity for automation, to improve efficiency, and maintain or improve margins to address this challenge. Many are finding a solution by streamlining operations. A simple way to do this is to use a type of technology that automates many of the processes that are handled manually today.

They found a solution that automates the data entry process, which allows the company to refocus these people in roles where they are able to positively impact customer relationships and help the company gain new customers.

This is not an uncommon situation; in fact, the top 10 healthcare organisations all have more people handling manual processes than is necessary.

The Customer Management Challenge

Millions of daily transactions take place as part of the healthcare supplier-customer order-to-cash (O2C) process. In order for this to operate efficiently, consistently accurate and on-time communication must take place between all the different systems involved in transactions.

Historically, adapting to these diverse formats has required time-consuming manual intervention and workarounds. This challenge of inaccurate data and diverse business processes is taking people away from adding value to customer relationships, driving up costs, slowing revenue growth, and eroding customer loyalty.

In an increasingly competitive world, this is no longer a sustainable situation.

DID YOU KNOW?Harvard Business Review research indicates

that “customers [with] the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had

the poorest past experience.”

WHAT COULD YOU DO WITH MORE PEOPLE IN

CUSTOMER-FACING ROLES?A major medical device supplier previously employed 400 people to enter manual data into the company’s systems, at an average cost of $50,000 per employee.

How to Improve Pharma & Med Device Customer Service By Optimising the O2C Process - OmPrompt | 3

The Solution? Customer Automation Management

Customer Automation Management is a cloud-based managed service that automates manual transactions across the whole order-to-cash (O2C) process. OmPrompt captures, centralises, automates, and shares all the critical intelligence as a company-wide resource via an easy-to-use dashboard.

Customer Automation Management allows healthcare suppliers to streamline their operations, while minimising the time spent processing data and reducing the costs associated with it. Moreover, it allows suppliers to take front-line staff away from data entry tasks and put them in roles that can give the business a strategic advantage. Here, they can contribute to improving the business by serving customers and ensuring their satisfaction – which, in turn, can have a positive impact on business revenue.

There’s no need for your customers to change their processes, whether they are small care homes, pharmacies or even the largest hospitals. They can all carry on with business as normal, but will have the benefit of reduced errors – and you will have the benefit of automated orders and other transactional messages. Customer Automation Management combines technology, people, and processes to provide the capabilities essential to handling the diversity of transaction formats and preferences, including adaptive multi-format support, intelligent business rules processing, customer master data validation, and

accelerated exception management.

A Unique Solution for the Unique Challenges in Healthcare

Customer Automation Management can also help healthcare organisations with these issues:

• Compliance. Tracking drugs, from a legislative perspective, and having an electronic blueprint of their movement is better managed and more secure using an electronic system rather than a paper trail.

• Replenishment of consignments. Some suppliers still own their goods, even when the goods are still on their customers’ shelves, and invoices are only issued for what is used. Automated systems make it easier to predict the need for new supplies and recognise when expiry dates are nearing.

• Vendor-managed inventory. Customer Automation Management can help buyers and vendors ensure that an inventory is optimised (VMI) for the entire product range.

“[We chose Customer Automation Management] because we needed a solution that’s scalable, to increase capacity without adding extra admin costs and additional headcount at the same rate as the business was growing. We also needed to reduce the current amount of manual work being done to

reduce our temporary workforce and help redeploy customer-facing staff to activities that required talent and specific skillset, like solving problems, speaking to customers, answering their questions, supporting

marketing, and freeing up our sales force to sell.”

– OmPrompt Customer, and European Director of Customer Services, Global Medical Device Company


Optimising the Healthcare O2C Process at Every Stage

Receiving Orders Using Customer Automation Management

The intelligent business rules built into the OmPrompt Customer Automation Management Solution capture all the data diversity that commonly exists. We permanently integrate the accumulated knowledge into the system to make it possible to quickly and accurately process orders, in whatever format they are received (including EDI, email, fax, PDF and a variety of other formats). The orders are then automatically entered into the back-end systems (such as ERPs) that are part of the supply chain.

Order Fulfilment

All the knowledge your team has accumulated about your customers, their processess, and their rules is essential for efficient order fulfilment. Customer Automation Management with OmPrompt helps capture as much of the information your team holds in their heads as possible to establish “one version of the truth” that can then be stored as business rules, and then acted upon.

Component What it does Positive impact on your business

Pre-order automation

• Hones best-practice

• Delivers visibility into future sales by managing diversity, including Vendor Managed Inventory systems integration and forecasting in multiple formats.

• Eliminates repetitive, zero-value-added tasks

• Improves forecast visibility and accuracy

• Provides a consolidated view that helps companies make more informed decisions.

Order automation

• Combines technology, people, and processes to provide multi-format order support, accelerated exception management, and intelligent business rules

• Optical scanning of orders in any provided format identifies pertinent information and enters it directly into the system.

• Reduces errors

• Reduces human resource investment

• Allows customer service teams to focus on managing customers more effectively and on upselling.


Fulfilment automation

• Based on an order, OmPrompt automates the movement of stock, location and expected time of movement, booking and bay management, and transactional messages across the system.

• Frees up your people to manage complex situations

• Allows staff to focus on service, not mundane tasks

• Ensures the highest degree of transactional excellence.

Delivery automation

• Captures, collates, and automates inputs from multiple sources and integrates them into usable data: trip events, discrepancies, and POD networks, no matter what the source

• Helps pre-empt issues by flagging potential problems automatically

• Eliminates the need for manual delivery status updates

• Provides accurate on-time and in-full (OTIF) metrics.

• Provides end-to-end visibility into what is happening at every stage of the logistics supply chain, allowing you to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.


Optimising the Healthcare O2C Process at Every Stage

Getting Paid Using Customer Automation Management

OmPrompt helps improve the accuracy of order entries and ensure these orders are fulfilled more rapidly. Faster Proof of Delivery means that problems with orders are reported more quickly and invoices can be adjusted accordingly. Invoices that match POD notes and take into account delivery problems are more likely to be uncontested and paid the first time around, promptly, and in full.


Invoice automation

• Links available data from transaction messages submitted by the customer with internal systems

• Identifies issues in the master data and corrects them before hitting the accounting system, or flags them for review

• Automates repetitive interventions that can be identified by the system not requiring human interaction.

• Reduces downstream errors• Reduces DSO, leading to better cash flow• Frees customer-facing staff to provide better service• E-invoicing compliance• Standardisation of e-invoicing templates.

Payment notification automation

• Captures, collates, and automates multiple payment notification types (remittance advice)

• Stores information about transactions that haven’t been reconciled yet

• Built-in intelligence monitors and flags outstanding issues.

• Accelerates exception management • Speeds up the payment process.

Dispute automation

• Automatically reconciles supplier and customer deliveries with claims documentation

• Identifies common patterns of miscommunication and eliminates them from the process.

• Promotes fact-based negotiations• Ensures compliance with defined processes• Speeds up claims management thanks to accurate data• Identifies the root causes of miscommunications• Eliminates opportunities for withholding or

delaying payment• Reduces the likelihood of future disputes.

Customer care automation

• Captures, collates, and automates the collection of complaints through notifications, classification of product failures or complaint trends; provides a holistic view of this information

• Flags illogical, or irreconcilable information to be handled by customer care and service teams.

• Brings automation to the process in a way that may offer insight into not just what happened, but why it happened.


Critical Benefits for Your Business

One of the primary benefits of Customer Automation Management is the ability to serve existing customers better and attract new ones. It also offers a number of other important benefits to healthcare suppliers.

Lower costs

• Improved accuracy of order entry means fewer mis-shipments, disputes, and returns

• Better exception handling means true exceptions are identified and dealt with more quickly

• International visibility improves cross-border inventory and cash management.

Increased value

• CSRs (customer service representatives) are freed up to focus on improving customer relations and driving more sales

• More integrated operations allows you a greater choice of supply chain contractors

• More accurate order processing, tailored for each customer, leads to greater overall customer satisfaction.

Improved cash flow

• Reduced DSO means less cash lingers in the supply chain and more goes in the bank, sooner

• Proactive stock management means surplus goods can be moved using special offers

• Lower DSO leads to improved cash management, which can raise stock prices and enhance your reputation.

Reduced process time

• Closing the O2C gaps minimises the length of the O2C process, so customers get products more rapidly – and you get paid sooner.

Reduced risks

• More accurate data across the O2C process leads to better reporting and a greater ability to demonstrate compliance

• More information about customers’ quirks and preferences is captured centrally, not held in the heads of individual staff members, leading to fewer errors and better overall service

• Processes can be adapted on a customer-by-customer basis to ensure unique requirements are consistently met

• Contingency plans for filling orders can be put in place if and when events, like bad weather, affect logistics operations and dispatch notes

• Real-time visibility helps you manage cash and inventory

• Reduced administrative work and solid internal controls ensure that you’re paying what you should be paying for invoices and claims; it also reduces costly errors that result from manual intervention.

Happier employees

• Staff members who feel more motivated by their ability to have a positive impact on customer relationships will likely earn more bonuses and commissions; consequently, they are more satisfied and productive. All of this leads to increased employee retention/reduced churn.

These case studies are just three examples of the challenges healthcare customers have and how OmPrompt helps solve them. The table below shows the average improvement of all

customers across a number of metrics.

Average customer results using OmPrompt customer automation management

Perfect order performance 2%

Overall efficiency gains in O2C processes 40%

DSO reduction 8%

On-time in-full improvement 3%

O2C cycle times 12%

Number of invoices requiring manual intervention to

resolve22% of queried invoices


Facts You Need to Know about OmPrompt

The OmPrompt solution:

• Allows you to scale, to get results fast, add customers, and add additional component solutions as and when required

• Is fully secure, available 24/7 and highly scalable

• An award-winning, industry-leading technology platform that fully automates your O2C process

• Can be implemented within weeks or days – no need for IT investment; no hardware or software to install

• Integrates with your existing infrastructure

• Is a pay-per-use solution based in the cloud so everyone in your organisation has appropriate visibility into orders, shipments, inventory, invoices, and payments

• Supports all EDI formats, such as EDICT, EDIFACT, TRADACOMS, ANSI, email, PDF, fax, AS/2, FTP, HTTP; it also supports all the main ERP, CRM, transport management/planning, and warehouse management systems.

“OmPrompt helps companies automate all the manually repetitive tasks across the entire order-to-cash process to free up resources so you can better serve your customers.

“Our medical device customer can now deal with more than in excess of 90% of their orders automatically, with only 9% needing human intervention. They’ve reduced error rates, labour costs -

including the cost associated with fixing those errors - and the pressure of constantly having to improve results with hard-pressed resources.”

– OmPrompt Customer Case Study

About OmPrompt

As the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt helps a growing number of the world’s leading brands eliminate gaps in the order-to-cash process that have traditionally required manual workarounds.

OmPrompt has innovative ways of automating repetitive manual work in the customer management cycle, enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restrictions, and eliminate risks to their businesses.

Our intelligent, cloud-based solutions are delivered as a service, co-exist with EDI-based solutions, are quick to deploy, easy to extend, and offer an exceptionally fast ROI.

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ContactOmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton Park, AbingdonOxfordshire, OX14 4RQUnited Kingdom

+44 (0)1235 [email protected]

http://www.omprompt.com/free-consultation

http://www.omprompt.com/free-consultation

http://www.omprompt.com

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How to Improve Pharma & Med Device Customer Service By Optimising the O2C Process