The Challenge
Concordance Healthcare Solutions, established in 2016 through the merger of Kreisers, MMS and Seneca Medical, stands as a leading independent healthcare distributor in the United States. They boast a network of 20 facilities strategically positioned across the nation. With a focus on serving diverse customers across the care continuum including local hospitals, the VA and long-term care facilities, Concordance ensures swift order fulfillment through same-day shipping via its own fleet of trucks, LTL or parcel. Maintaining service levels amidst high customer expectations for accuracy and fill rates, while mitigating the impact of supplier backorders, Concordance saw these challenges compounded by the consistent need to hire and retain staff. All of this posed significant hurdles, exacerbated even further during the COVID-19 pandemic. With an industrywide turnover rate of 40%-45%, Concordance's attempt to prioritize efficient training and productivity for temporary labor was not meeting the mark. Recognizing the need to alleviate employee strain while meeting service level agreements and accuracy benchmarks, Concordance made the decision to seek innovation.
The Solution
Concordance Healthcare Solutions partnered with Locus Robotics to deploy more than 165 AMRs across 10 distribution centers, helping improve order accuracy and operational efficiency. The solution reduced training time from two hours to 10 minutes, lowered error rates from approximately 0.04% to as low as 0.01%, and gave the company the flexibility to add new robots within a day as volume increased.
The Results
Beyond accuracy improvements, the intuitive user interface — featuring product visuals — expedited training, slashing it from two hours to a mere 10 minutes. Employees swiftly adapted to the system, efficiently fulfilling orders with minimal errors. Notably, they trained one of their human resource representatives for 10 minutes with the Locus robots and they successfully picked 260 lines error free. They had never picked a single line prior to that. Situations like this truly underscore the system’s userfriendliness and effectiveness. The flexibility and scalability of the Locus Robotics system facilitated seamless integration of new Locus robots within a day, in stark contrast to other automation tools requiring extensive modifications to accommodate increased volume. Overall, the partnership between Concordance Healthcare Solutions and Locus Robotics exemplifies a successful synergy between innovation and operational excellence in the healthcare distribution sector.
Productivity gains have been achieved through the integration of AMRs, particularly in hybrid mode where each item is scanned for validation. The implementation resulted in a substantial reduction in error rates, which originally sat around 0.04% and now are as low as 0.01%. One of our facilities achieved error-free operations for three consecutive months.