The challenge: Meet stringent quality and turnaround times to improve customer experience
Our client, a private-equity owned healthcare business and data automation company, empowers healthcare organizations to enable better patient care and maximize industry savings using cloud-based supply chain technology exchange platform, analytics and solutions..
The client helps numerous hospitals across the US and the EU efficiently process Purchase Orders (POs), ensuring that their clinical staff have timely access to medical supplies and medications – the key to providing quality care. Typically, hospitals receive POs either in an electronic format or via fax. Even a small number of faxed POs can introduce delays and errors into the supply chain as they require manual processing, hampering efficiency and taking the focus of hospital staff away from patient-centric activities.
Every day, the client received nearly 22,000 POs from numerous hospitals. Processing this large volume of POs within a rigorous turnaround time (TAT) was beyond the scope of manual processing. What more? The POs came in several formats and languages along with varied instructions from over 350 plus suppliers, introducing further complexity into the process. The client was therefore looking to meet the stringent TAT requirement of 30 minutes for its daily volume of 22,000 POs along with the ability to:
- Identify varied Purchase Order formats specific to hospitals
- Manage non-English language POs
- Rapidly process complex supplier instructions while minimizing errors
The solution: Automated data extraction and pattern recognition
Firstsource leveraged its proprietary workflow platform Sympraxis which streamlines business processes with intelligent workflows. The Firstsource team ensured seamless migration to Sympraxis, without any disruption to the client processes or its end customers. It leverages an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rules engine to accurately extract information from POs and convert them into an electronic format. The rules engine is equipped to identify over 8500 keywords across seven different languages – including English, Italian, Spanish, German, Catalan, and French which helped in seamless managing non-English POs for the client. It further allowed users to automatically sort POs by different parameters to handle special processing instructions such as rush orders, dropship orders, and consignment orders based on keywords.
To optimize resources as well as costs, the Firstsource team carefully analyzed processes and came up with the right-fit automation solution. The team decided to continually monitor the historical flow of volume to forecast ‘Day of the Week’ patterns and ‘Hours of the Day’ patterns, including peak intervals volume flow. This helped to ensure that staffing levels were in sync with the predicted multiple peak intervals to meet the stringent 30 minutes turnaround.
The result: Meeting TAT expectations while improving quality and processes
Firstsource enabled 10X processing volume growth over time – across EU – supported by non-English language processing capabilities. The solution enabled several tangible outcomes for the client, such as field level quality with 99.9% accuracy, nearly 22,000 POs processed within 30 Minutes TAT, accelerating supplier onboarding, and real-time order tracking and reporting.
