by
Nancy Ryerson, Staff Writer | August 20, 2013
From the August 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The software can also track trends so the company can know when certain parts need to be stocked.
“The ‘no-stocks’ has been really helpful,” says Vandersteen. “We’ll record a no stock, and as we pull those reports, it may alert us to a system that’s needed. It could be that not only do our current customers need it, but it could be potential customers calling in on it. It has been a tool that we’ve used to station and really benchmark some equipment that we need to add to our portfolio.”
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The company’s software system is less helpful for predicting trends before that happens, mostly because the parts world is generally unpredictable, says customer service manager Eric Probst.
“In this industry, it seems very, very difficult to find trending,” he says.
Other companies are able to bring the organizational value of their software systems to customers by including searchable databases on their websites.
“We have a homegrown database which tracks our inventory, incoming requests, quotes, sales and trends,” says Phi GEM’s Glas. “The parts inventory portion of this database is searchable in real-time on our website and we have taken great efforts to make searching for parts on our site as simple and comprehensive as possible for our users.”
While personalized software has its value, some companies have decided to purchase a full solution in order to better consolidate all of their information.
“We invested in enterprise resource planning software called Vantage,” says Mike Helms, president of Troff Medical. “It helped with the complication of having accounting, customer service and inventory,
and all of it being in disjointed systems. Now it’s all under one software package.”
Troff Medical recently signed up with MPX Cloud, a service that organizes and categorizes medical equipment parts into an integrated online platform.
“It’s all in an effort to communicate with our customers,” says Helms.
Matt Ulman, CTO of DOTmed.com, agrees that organization and customer communication is key to growth in the parts industry, “Over the past twelve months we’ve launched a new full featured service for parts inventory management via DOTmed. com at the request of our parts sellers. This system has allowed us to increase the parts inventory listed on DOTmed.com by nearly 40 percent.”
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