Medical Sales & Service Achieves Full Regulation Compliance, Improves Efficiencies with SPS

Medical Sales & Service is a major player in the Western Australian healthcare sector. Providing a large range of medical consumables and capital items, the company is a preferred supplier to numerous government and private hospitals in the state, as well as throughout Australia.

A Big Medical Supplies Company with a Big Regulatory Compliance Project

SPS Commerce has successfully this launched Western Australian health and medical supplies company onto the National Product Catalogue (NPC) — in time and on budget. Medical Sales & Service is now compliant with current industry requirements and the organization will be able to embark on the next stage of online trading with its clients.

In 2009, Medical Sales & Service received a directive from the Western Australian Department of Health and the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) to have their product and pricing data available on the NPC. The NPC is a single, centralized repository of product and pricing healthcare data, hosted by GS1 Australia on its GS1net™ — a data synchronization platform. The platform enables the secure sharing of item data, such as product identifiers and descriptions, units of measure, package contents, product classification, pricing and other healthcare information. Angela Hariohoedojo, general manager – Australia at SPS Commerce said, “The big challenge was to get Medical Sales & Service onto the NPC under stringent time constraints. To do this, we worked very closely with the company and GS1 to get them uploaded on time and ensure that all data synchronization requirements were met.”

Medical Sales & Service Compliance a Smooth Operation with SPS Assortment

To get Medical Sales & Service up and running on the NPC, SPS developed a multi-layered approach that included:

• Connecting the company to GS1net™ by accessing product and pricing data from the existing ERP system using the SPS solution
• Creating integrations to translate and streamline data
• Validating data against a set of business rules prior to sending it to GS1net™
• Uploading validated data onto GS1net™
• Generating notifications on the “data status”, enabling corrective actions to be taken
• Generating responses from GS1net™ which notify the company when product and pricing data has been validated and uploaded on to the system
• Creating a backup system by sending data which is uploaded onto GS1net™ back to SPS in case of data loss

The new system provides Medical Sales & Service with accurate data upload and an accurate trading cycle, reduced costs and errors through the elimination of manual data processes, and increased data security through encryption and authentication.

The final result is an integrated system that is fully compliant with industry requirements and ready for the next stage. Rod Dowding, sales manager, Medical Sales & Service, said, “The success of this project was integral to our business going forward. Thanks to SPS, we have been able to meet government requirements on time, improve our business efficiencies and increase the quality of our trading relationships.”