Success Stories Winmill Application Development Provides Custom Solution for Medical Device Manufacturer
The Project
For more than 80 years, the name of this firm has been synonymous with high-quality, innovative medical devices. Today they develop, manufacture, export, import, market, distribute and sell a diverse portfolio of medical devices, supplies and accessories that generates $280 million in annual sales.
As their annual sales continued to grow steadily, the company found an urgent need for a sophisticated system to support consistent and configurable pricing, inventory management, workflow approval chains, and business reporting. The solution needed to seamlessly integrate with their existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. They looked at off-the-shelf software, but nothing met their specific business requirements. It became clear that they needed a custom solution. That’s when they called Winmill Software.
Challenge
- Inconsistent pricing being performed by different departments and different business units
- No integration between pricing, sales and inventory systems
- No approval workflow
- No integration with the corporate ERP system
- Limited availability of reports
Solution
- Standardized, flexible pricing strategy for the company’s entire product line
- Centralized product consignment process for tracking, viewing, and updating inventory levels
- Integrated business process workflow with a highly visible chain-of-command approval process
- Tight integration between the new pricing and inventory system and the corporate ERP
- Robust reporting
The Results
Winmill designed and built a robust and comprehensive ASP.NET Application (with a powerful SQL Server database) to address the company’s intricate and complex needs. While adhering to an aggressive and rigorous schedule, Winmill was able to meet the required timeline and deliver a stable and full-featured system in just six months. The system has been an enormous success, not only because of the functionality it provides, but because of its return on investment. The alternative of purchasing and integrating several off-the-shelf products, plus the staff required to manage such systems, would have been cost prohibitive.Today, the system is an integral part of the firm’s daily business process. It boasts over 100 active users that comprise the company’s sales force, service team, product managers, marketing team, home office administrators and executives.
With the huge success of this system in their North American offices, the firm is now looking to deploy the application to their operations around the world.
