Syspro Helps Arjo Achieve Substantial Working Capital Savings

Customer Profile

Established in Sweden in 1957, Arjo is a global medical devices, services and solutions company that improves the everyday lives of people with reduced mobility and age-related health concerns. Today, Arjo is helping people in more than 60 countries by providing products like medical beds, hygiene, disinfectants, and patient handling equipment.

Arjo’s commitment to providing its customers with a high on-time repair rate was being hindered by sub-optimal processes. Every month, one of the service directors would spend three hours creating a spreadsheet containing details of supply stock inventory and send it to all 50 of the company’s technicians.
 
Each technician then spent an hour reviewing and updating their requirements before sending the spreadsheet to a central operator who in turn spent 15 minutes per technician to manually review the information and create stock transfers.
 

This process was one of many tasks handled by Arjo’s sales and services management group. It was extremely inefficient and led to inaccuracies. If the technicians didn’t have the required inventory in stock of a particular spare part when it was needed, they had to wait until the part arrived from the central warehouse.
 
To automate the stock transfer process, Arjo used the Supply Chain Review program which is part of Syspro 8’s Material Requirements Planning module. The program determines when stock is needed in certain warehouses based on the established minimum and maximum inventory levels and automatically suggests and creates supply chain transfers to fulfill that need. Operators can review the suggestions and create the supply chain transfers automatically.
 
This eliminated the need for technicians to manually compile a list of their stock code requirements and send this list to the person responsible for creating the supply chain transfers.
 
The Syspro deployment was completed in one phase, and running the Supply Chain Review program now takes about 30 minutes. Another 30 minutes are spent by an operator to review the suggested requisitions. This has saved the company more than 95% of manhours, helped eliminate errors and freed up time for resources to proactively do what they are supposed to do. The ownership of the process has been moved away from the Sales and Services group to the Supply Chain group.

The Outcome

Arjo forecasts working capital savings of $100,000 to $250,000 in three to six months and productivity has already improved drastically. A process which earlier took about 65.5 work hours to complete, was error-prone and involved more than 50 people, can now be done by one person in under an hour. In addition, one person is responsible for inventory review and valuations, and approvals of stock transfers are automatic.